Stop Training Models in DEV. Train Them in LAB.

<p><strong><em>Congratulations, ML professionals of all kinds!</em></strong>&nbsp;Only 10 years after Andrew Ng taught everyone about gradient descent, our respectable profession has almost entirely moved away from using the&nbsp;<code>PROD</code>&nbsp;environment for everything. Pat yourself on the back.</p> <p><em>Now shame on you!</em>&nbsp;Because I glanced over your shoulder just now and saw you training a model in&nbsp;<code>DEV</code>.&nbsp;<strong>There&rsquo;s a better way, people, and it&rsquo;s called&nbsp;</strong><code><strong>LAB</strong></code><strong>.</strong></p> <p>So here&rsquo;s what I want to tell you about:</p> <ul> <li>Environments &mdash; what they are.</li> <li>How Machine Learning has two very distinct concepts of a development environment,&nbsp;<code>DEV</code>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<code>LAB</code>, that should not be confused (or share the same name).</li> <li>How to organize your team&rsquo;s work between&nbsp;<code>DEV</code>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<code>LAB</code>, and the implications for other environments.</li> </ul> <h1>Environments</h1> <h2>What are Environments?</h2> <p>Let&rsquo;s talk for a minute about Environments. First off, let me provide a dense definition of&nbsp;<em>Environment</em>&nbsp;and then unpack it a bit. For the purpose of this blog, an&nbsp;<em>Environment</em>&nbsp;is a runtime that is configured to use a specific group of infrastructure resources for a particular use case. (This definition mashes a few different concepts together, namely&nbsp;<em>runtime</em>,&nbsp;<em>resources</em>, and&nbsp;<em>use case.&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.tinystacks.com/blog-post/a-guide-to-stacks-and-stages-on-aws/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Here</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tinystacks.com/blog-post/what-are-stacks-stages-and-environments/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>&nbsp;are some useful blog posts separating those concepts for you.)</p> <p><a href="https://johndanielraines.medium.com/stop-training-models-in-dev-train-them-in-lab-ad266c6ff3a6"><strong>Website</strong></a></p>
Tags: Dev Models