With AI and machine learning creeping in every industry, the paradigm of IT as we know it is also changing, ML is a natural extension of the software revolution we have seen in the last decades, knowing how to utilize ML in your industry will be a key element for success and growth in the coming years.

This transformation will need a new vision, as new jobs, new platforms and new ways of doing business will emerge from it. I believe at this point we are past the hype of AI and we are in the middle of a reality where machine learning and inference are helping thousands of businesses grow and prosper.

I have read several books on AI and ML, and the two that stands out are:

• Human + Machine , reimagining work in the age of AI
• Pragmatic AI : an introduction to Cloud-Based Machine learning.

either you are an engineer, a manager, an executive, or merely driven by curiosity about AI and ML, I recommend that you read these books to fully grasp its impact on many industries

Human + Machine, reimagining work in the age of AI

Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson did an amazing job at reimaging what work will look like in the age of AI, they introduced the notion of the Missing Middle; a realistic approach of looking at this transformation by defining what machine can do, what humans can do, and  where humans and machines have hybrid activities.

Humans can judge, lead, empathize and create, machines can iterate, predict and adapt.

AI can give humans superpowers, but humans need to train, sustain machines, and at times explain its decisions.

Paul and James talk about an entirely new set of jobs that will emerge from this alliance.

Pragmatic AI : an introduction to Cloud-Based Machine learning

if you are an engineer who likes to understand how the training and the inference work under the hood, this book would be a great resource for you.

Pragmatic AI explains how you can utilize cloud resources in AWS Azure, and GCP to train your models, optimize them, and deploy a production scale machine learning powered application.

the book also contains real applications and code samples to help reproduce it on your own, and it covers the following topics :

• AI and ML toolchain: from python ecosystem toolchains like numpy,  Jupiter Notebooks and others to the tools available on AWS GCP and Azure
• DevOps practices to help you deliver and deploy
• Creating practical AI applications from scratch
• Optimization

there are definitely a lot of publications concerning AI and ML, but the combination of the two books above will cover the organizational and structural challenges that an organization will face when it comes to adopting AI, and also the technical backgrounds needed to work with it.

Often when training machine learning models you find yourself creating different estimators and tuning this parameter or that to get the results you want, you may also find yourself wanting to save the results of those iterations, to save you time in the future.

that’s what I’m trying to address in this post, having some sort of artifact repository for machine learning models, but saving your parameters as metadata using the following design :

1: user uploads artifacts using pre-signed s3 URLs

2  and 3: a putObject event triggers the lambda function to make an API call to an ec2 instance running an HTTP server  to read the estimator from S3 and get the parameters

4: saving the parameters in DynamoDB

Uploading artifacts :

I use AWS S3 to store the assets, making use of the pre-signed URL feature that gives you the possibility to use temporary URLs to upload files to S3, which takes away the managing permissions.

to orchestrate all this I like to use my favorite serverless framework.

here is the code on github

Deploying Serverless stack :

$serverless deploy

this will create 5 endpoints :

• POST /dev/asset
• GET /dev/asset
• PUT /dev/asset/{asset_id}
• DELETE /dev/asset/{asset_id}

these endpoints will allow you to update/create/delete an artifact, in this case, is a model.

for more reading about this check out the readme page of this serverless example

Getting the parameters :

in this part, in the EC2 instance, we will try to download the model and get the parameters to store them in dynamo DB

Initially I thought I could leverage all of this work in Lambda, so I don’t have to create an EC2 instance just to read the parameters, unfortunately, there couple issues with that solution, one of them is the size of the dependencies once you add SKlearn libraries as a dependency, the size of the lambda zip reaches 60Mb. But once uploaded there was an issue running SKlearn part of the lambda, for this iteration I decided to use a t2.micro on EC2.

the EC2 has a python web server running that get requests with an asset_id, downloads the asset, get the parameters and store them in dynamodb

this is the code for the server :

https://github.com/mbenachour/store_ml_models/blob/master/server.py

Testing the upload :

to test all this I created a small python script:

import sys
import requests
from sklearn.externals import joblib

def upload(filename):
model = loadModel(filename)
print (model.get_params())
url = 'https://oo0cl2av91.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/asset'
response = requests.post(url)
print (response)
presigned = response.json().get('body').get('upload_url')
response = requests.put(presigned, data=open(filename).read())
print (response)

def loadModel(model_path):
download_path = model_path
#s3_client.download_file(BUCKET_NAME, model, '/tmp/model.pkl')
return joblib.load(download_path)

upload(sys.argv[1])

to run it use :

 python test.py  your_model.pkl 

if you look at your dynamodb table you will see that your model has a description :

What is it?

AIOps is a term that has been used in the last few years to describe the ability to drive intelligence from the day-to-day data that IT operations generate. The data source could vary from monitoring tools like SolarWinds to service desk tools like ServiceNow to automation tools like configuration management ( chef, puppet … ), or log search platforms like Splunk

One area where AIOps can be an asset to operation teams is incident predictability and remediation, there are others like storage and capacity management, resources utilization …

How can AIOPS help prevent the next outage :

the footprint of digital systems and businesses is increasing every day and so is the speed at which the data is produced.

For example, a Palo Alto firewall can produce up to 12 million events in one day, the manual correlation of data is nearly impossible, and that’s why we need an overview of the entire landscape of data produced by IT operations,  transformation of data to be able to serve as training and test sets for machine learning.

Starting from the promise that an incident is a result of a change ( voluntary or involuntary) to a configuration, a device, a network, or an application, all these changes if monitored and reported on correctly can help create a good context to understand the root-cause analysis of the incident.

You can create an ML model that will help you predict the next outage, notify operation teams, and help reduce the downtime.

Suppose that you transformed the input data that you gathered from all your sources, organized it into dataset like the one below and used a supervised learning process to create an ML model :

your model will be able to make predictions of future incidents when fed with real-time input coming from your tools and logs :

over time, with more data, your model will get better at detecting future anomalies, with much more accuracy.

in conclusion

There is a lot of writing out there about AIOps, but the application, in my opinion, is a bit harder.

For different reasons, one being the spectrum of toolset in IT operations is very wide, and two being that the data structures are different from one organization to another, which means that trying to put a generic machine learning process to produce insights, will be at worst impossible and at best will lack accuracy.

For an organization to be able to get intelligent insights from  AIOps, there has to be an internal effort to train your models, because the quality of your future prediction of major incidents will essentially depend on the quality of your training and test sets.

Links :

https://blogs.gartner.com/andrew-lerner/2017/08/09/aiops-platforms/

https://www.ca.com/us/products/aiops.html

https://www.splunk.com/blog/2017/11/16/what-is-aiops-and-what-it-means-for-you.html

Have you ever thought of your data centers and cloud infrastructure ( private and public ) as one big computer? where you can deploy your applications with a click of a button, without worrying too much about the underlying infrastructure? well … DCOS allows you to manage your infrastructure from a single point, offering you the possibility to run distributed applications, containers, services, jobs while maintaining a certain abstraction from the infrastructure layer, as long as it provides computing, storage, and networking capabilities.

After deploying my ML model on a kubernates Cluster, a lambda function, I will deploy it on a DCOS cluster.

what is DCOS:

DCOS is a datacenter operating system, DC/OS is itself a distributed system, a cluster manager, a container platform, and an operating system.

DCOS manages the 3 layers of software, platform, and infrastructure.

the dashboard :

the catalog:

DCOS UI offers a catalog of certified and community packages that the users can install in seconds , like kafka, spark, hadoop, MySQL ..

Deploying Apps and ML models on DCOS :

the application I’m deploying is a web server running the model I created in my previous posts to make predictions.

DCOS relies on an application definition file that looks like this :

app.json :

{
    "volumes": null,
    "id": "mlpregv3",
    "cmd": "python server.py",
    "instances": 1,
    "cpus": 1,
    "mem": 128,
    "disk": 0,
    "gpus": 0,

    "container": {
        "type": "DOCKER",
        "docker": {
            "image": "mbenachour/dcos-mlpreg:1",
            "forcePullImage": false,
            "privileged": false,
            "network": "HOST",
            "portMappings": [
                { "containerPort": 8088, "hostPort": 8088 }
            ]
        }
    }
}

the rest of the code can be found in my GitHub repo

after you configure your DCOS CLI and log in, you can run this command :

if we take a look at the UI we can see that app/web server has been deployed :

in the last post, we talked about how to deploy a Machine learning trained model on Kubernates.

Here is another way of deploying ML models: AWS lambda + API gateway

Basically, your model (mlpreg.pkl) will be stored in S3, your lambda function will download the model use it to make predictions, another call will allow you to get the model hyperparameters, and sent it back to the user.

to deploy AWS services, we will use a framework called Serverless

serverless allow you with a single configuration file to define functions, create resources, declare permissions, configure endpoints …

serverless uses one main config file and one or multiple code files :

• handler.py : the lambda function
• serverless.yml : serverless configuration file

here is what the serverless configuration file for this example would look like :

service: deploy-ml-service
plugins:
  - serverless-python-requirements
provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: python2.7
  iamRoleStatements:
      - Effect: Allow
        # Note: just for the demo, we are giving full access to s3
        Action:
          - s3:*
        Resource: "*"
functions:
  predict:
    handler: handler.predict
    events:
      - http:
          path: predict
          method: post
          cors: true
          integration: lambda
  getModelInfo:
    handler: handler.getModelInfo
    events:
      - http:
          path: params
          method: post
          cors: true
          integration: lambda

as described in the example we will create two functions one will make a prediction using the model we built in the last post, the other one will display the model hyperparameters :

• predict
• getModelInfo

to load the model we have  :

• load_model : loading the stored model from S3

handler.py

from sklearn.externals import joblib
import boto3

BUCKET_NAME = 'asset-s3-uploader-02141'

def predict(event,context):
  input = event["body"]["input"]
  modelName = event["body"]["model_name"]
  data = float(input)
  return loadModel(modelName).predict(data)[0]

def loadModel(model):
  s3_client = boto3.client('s3')
  download_path = '/tmp/model.pkl'
  s3_client.download_file(BUCKET_NAME, model, '/tmp/model.pkl')
  return joblib.load(download_path)

def getModelInfo(event,context):
  model = event["body"]["model_name"]
  return loadModel(model).get_params()

$Serverless Deploy ! 

yep that’s all it takes, and your services will be deployed in seconds:

Run the tests:

getting the model Hyperparameters :

root@58920085f9af:/tmp/deploy# curl -s -d "model_name=mlpreg.pkl" https://abcefgh123.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/params | python -m json.tool
{
"activation": "relu",
"alpha": 0.001,
"batch_size": "auto",
"beta_1": 0.9,
"beta_2": 0.999,
"early_stopping": false,
"epsilon": 1e-08,
"hidden_layer_sizes": [
1000
],
"learning_rate": "constant",
"learning_rate_init": 0.01,
"max_iter": 1000,
"momentum": 0.9,
"nesterovs_momentum": true,
"power_t": 0.5,
"random_state": 9,
"shuffle": true,
"solver": "adam",
"tol": 0.0001,
"validation_fraction": 0.1,
"verbose": false,
"warm_start": false
}

Making Predictions :

root@58920085f9af:/tmp/deploy# curl -s -d "input=1&model_name=mlpreg.pkl" https://abcdefg123.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/predict | python -m json.tool
0.13994134155335683