New: Develop ML/AI Faster With Guided Journeys And Fast Image Bakery

September 17, 2024

Today, as part of our release week, we’re introducing two major features to help you build ML/AI systems more quickly on Outerbounds:

  • Guided journeys that help you build end-to-end ML/AI systems for the real world.
  • Blazing fast, automated Docker image builds – no infrastructure, no boilerplate required.

New: Guided journeys

A major challenge in building real-world ML/AI systems is managing their inherent complexity, driven by their many moving parts. Consider a typical MLOps stack from the 2020s that includes an experiment tracker such as Weights and Biases, a model registry such as MLFlow, a development environment often in Jupyter notebooks, GPU providers like Lambda Labs, and inference frameworks like BentoML.

Many of these tools are excellent, but much of the accidental complexity arises from the gaps between them, not the tools themselves. A key value proposition of Outerbounds has been to solve the above issues in a delightfully human-friendly way.

Platform overview

With the new journeys feature, we provide guided templates for various use cases touching key features of Outerbounds:

  • Built-in workstations for easy development, both with VSCode IDE and Jupyter notebooks.
  • Secure integrations to data warehouses and other services, following your security policies.
  • Dependency management with blazing fast Docker builds.
  • Scalable compute securely and cost-efficiently in your cloud account(s).
  • Customizable observability with a new monitoring dashboard highlighting key metrics.
  • One-click production deployments showing the new deployments UI.

New: Blazing fast, hassle-free image builds with Fast Bakery

The topic of software dependency management – that is, issues you face with pip install and Docker images – is often underappreciated in the world of ML/AI. Yet, it is often one of the biggest practical pain points.

Fast Bakery takes your existing @pypi or @conda environments defined in Metaflow, and converts them into a Docker image on the fly, blazing fast! No need to craft Dockerfiles by hand, remember which image to use, or wait for tens of minutes for a CI/CD system to bake an image. In our tests, the image with massive packages was freshly baked in less than seven seconds!

Fast Bakery provides the best of both worlds: Developers don’t have to learn about the intricacies of building images and engineers don’t have to maintain them by hand. Thanks to blazing fast build times, you can test various package versions and tools as often as needed, leading to much faster development cycles.

Start building today

To test the new features in your environment, get a demo!