A personal journey towards Cloud Native Data Science

Talk delivered at Open Data Science Conference, San Francisco, November 2015

As more and more applications are being deployed in the cloud, developers are learning how to best design software for this new type of system. These Cloud Native applications are single-purpose, stateless and easily scalable. This contrasts with traditional approaches which created large, monolithic, and fragile systems. What can data scientists learn from these new approaches, and how can we make sure our models are easily deployed in this kind of system? In this talk I will discuss the principles of cloud native design, how they apply to data science driven applications and how data scientists can get started using open source cloud native platforms.

Transcript

1. A personal journey towards
   Cloud Native Data Science
   @OPENDATASCI
   OPEN
   DATA
   SCIENCE
   CONFERENCE
   Ian Huston
   @ianhuston
   S A N F R A N C I S C O | 2 0 1 5
   

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2. Who am I?
   Data Scientist
   http://github.com/ihuston
   @ianhuston
   

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3. At Microsoft
   8 of the 16 data scientists interviewed
   work on or manage the operationalization
   of predictive models
   
   
   
   
   
   The Emerging Role of Data Scientists on Software Development Teams
   Microsoft Research. Technical Report. MSR-TR-2015-30
   
   http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=242286
   

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4. My story…
   

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5. Academia: How to Scare a Postdoc
   “Which version of your
   code and data
   was used to create
   Figure 3 in v2 of your recent
   paper?”
   

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6. http://software-carpentry.org/
   

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7. Research library writing
   •  Packaging & Dependencies
   •  Installation & Deployment
   •  Try to automate deploy over cluster
   

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8. Starting out with Data Science
   
   
   •  Big & Fast Bare Metal Appliances
   •  Lots of scripting and glue code
   •  Manual deployments
   •  Lots of cron jobs
   

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9. Test Driven Development
   Continuous Integration & Delivery
   Continuous Improvement
   Cloud Native Applications
   

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10. What does Cloud Native mean?
    

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11. Cloud Native Haiku
    
    Here is my source code
    Run it on the cloud for me
    I do not care how.
    -  Onsi Fakhouri
    @onsijoe
    

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12. Then Now
    assume fragile infrastructure
    assume reliable infrastructure
    release code every 3 months release code early and often
    works in my environment shared responsibility
    tightly coupled loosely coupled
    

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13. Implications
    Build for failure
    
    Make app disposable & scalable
    
    Accept constraints of platform
    
    
    
    
    

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14. •  One Codebase with revision control
    •  Explicitly declare dependencies
    •  Stateless Processes – attach external data stores
    •  Parity between dev & production environments
    •  …
    http://12factor.net
    

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15. Why should we apply this "
    to Data Science?
    

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16. Things I hear from data scientists:
    How do I …
    •  speed up the set up of my system?
    •  keep different versions of Python/R in sync?
    •  make my dev environment the same as production?
    •  make my models easily available?
    •  make repeatable/reproducible model runs?
    

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17. What is Cloud Native Data Science?
    12 factors +
    
    Reproducibility
    
    Expose models as services
    
    Explicit configuration for data pipelines
    
    What else?
    

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18. Focus on Provisioning & Deployment
    Open Source platform powering:
    GE Predix, Intel Trusted Analytics Platform,
    IBM Bluemix, SAP HANA Cloud,
    HP Helion Cloud
    

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19. Deploy your app with cf push
    CF determines app type (Java, Python, Ruby, …)
    
    Installs necessary environment
    
    Provisions & binds data sources "
    
    Creates (sub-)domain, routing and load balancing
    
    Continual app health checks & restarts
    

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20. How do I get started?
    Covers:
    •  Deploying simple Python applications
    •  Scaling instances
    •  Provisioning & Connecting to data sources
    •  Using Conda for Python package management
    Cloud Foundry for Data Science tutorial
    https://github.com/ihuston/python-cf-examples
    

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21. Focus on data pipelines
    Spring XD & Spring Cloud Data Flow
    Pipelines for composable data services
    
    
    DSL based on Unix pipes:
    http | filter | transform | hdfs!
    
    
    Multiple paths with taps:
    mypipeline.filter > newtransform | redis!
    
    

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22. Integrations
    Data Ingestion and Pipeline Processing
    Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, JMS, HTTP, GPDB, HAWQ
    Partition, Filter, Transform, Split, Aggregate
    Real Time Analytics and Complex Event Processing
    Spark Streaming, RxJava, PMML Scoring
    Redis, GemFire, Cassandra, etc..
    Batch Workflow Orchestration + ETL
    Map Reduce, HDFS, PIG, Hive, GPDB, HAWQ, Spark
    RDBMS, FILE, FTP, Log, Mongo, Splunk
    

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23. Where can I learn more?
    DevOps Novel: The Phoenix Project by Kim, Behr & Stafford
    
    12factor.net
    
    cloudfoundry.org
    github.com/ihuston/python-cf-examples
    
    cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-dataflow
    projects.spring.io/spring-xd/
    
    
    

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24. @ianhuston
    

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