In the previous chapter, we went through the data pipeline portion of an end-to-end production ML pipeline. Here, in the final chapter of the book, we will cover the final portion of the end-to-end pipeline: training, deployment, and serving.
To remind you with a visual, figure 14.1 shows the whole pipeline, borrowed from chapter 13. I’ve circled the part of the system we’ll address in this chapter.
You may ask, what exactly is a pipeline and why do we use one, whether for ML production or any programmatic production operation that is managed by orchestration? You typically use pipelines when the job, such as training or other operations handled by orchestration, has multiple steps that occur in sequential order: do step A, do step B, and so on.