Fast, Automatic Containerization of ML and AI Projects with Fast Bakery

A new feature in Outerbounds, Fast Bakery, builds containers for your ML/AI projects quickly and automatically.

Machine learning, AI in particular, requires significant compute power. To make cloud adoption seamless and effective, two key features are needed: secure access to on-demand cloud instances, and streamlined deployment of code and dependencies to remote environments.

The problem with existing container pipelines

Many container pipelines are designed for traditional software teams, not fast-moving ML/AI projects. The challenges include: frequent image changes needed for experimentation, builds that take tens of minutes to hours, inability to modify images without a separate DevOps team, Dockerfiles requiring expertise outside core ML/AI skills, non-reproducible images, managing multiple image versions, CUDA/GPU compatibility issues, and large image sizes (5-10GB).

Introducing Fast Bakery

Fast Bakery is an efficient containerization backend within Outerbounds that packages ML/AI dependencies into reproducible images automatically, enabling rapid deployment and efficient scaling. It supercharges the existing @pypi and @conda decorators by turning the environments they specify into container images automatically.

Fast Bakery advantages: no need to learn new tools or Dockerfiles, blazing fast builds (typical image ready in seconds), images maintained automatically, and a registry optimized for highly parallelized ML/AI workloads. No changes in user code are required.

Fast Bakery is fast

We ran benchmarks with five representative ML/AI environments: XGBoost (800MB), Bokeh (1.7GB), Model Maker with tensorflow (2.4GB), Transformer RAG with PyTorch Lightning (5.9GB), and vLLM inference (6.7GB). Fast Bakery never took more than 40s to produce an image, whereas GitHub Actions took over 5 minutes in the largest case – and Fast Bakery can be 7x faster than open-source Metaflow decorators.

Advanced features

Fast Bakery also supports: private package registries, base image management, augmenting packages in the base image, secure multi-cloud images, task-level audit trail, and HIPAA and SOC2 compliance.

Try it by yourself

Fast Bakery is available on Outerbounds today. Sign up for a free trial and take it for a spin!