chapter one

1 Getting started with MLOps and ML engineering

 

This chapter covers

  • Understanding machine learning (ML) systems in production
  • The complete ML life cycle from experimentation to deployment
  • Essential skills for production-grade ML engineering
  • Building your first ML platform
  • Real-world ML project architectures

Are you ready to build production-grade machine learning (ML) systems with confidence? This book will transform you into a confident ML engineer—someone who can successfully shepherd ML projects from conception to production. Through hands-on examples and real-world scenarios, you’ll learn the following:

  • How to design and implement reliable ML systems that work in production
  • The complete ML life cycle, from problem formulation to monitoring
  • Essential patterns for building robust ML pipelines and services
  • Practical MLOps skills that companies actually need
  • Real-world techniques for maintaining ML systems at scale

Whether you’re a data scientist looking to deploy models confidently, a software engineer transitioning to ML, or an ML engineer wanting to level up your production skills, this book provides the practical knowledge you need to succeed with real-world ML systems. Rather than overwhelming you with theory, we’ll take a practical approach.

Each chapter builds on the previous one, introducing new concepts and tools as we need them. Our journey through this book follows a clear progression, accomplishing the following:

1.1 The ML life cycle

1.1.1 Experimentation phase

1.1.2 Development/staging/production phase

1.2 Skills needed for MLOps

1.2.1 Required skills for ML engineers

1.2.2 Prerequisites

1.3 Building an ML platform

1.3.1 Build vs. buy

1.3.2 Looking ahead: From MLOps to LLMOps

1.3.3 Tools used in this book

1.4 Building ML systems

1.4.1 Introducing the ML projects

1.4.2 ML projects

Summary