What is Managed MLflow?
Managed MLflow extends the functionality of MLflow, an open source platform developed by Databricks for building better models and generative AI apps, focusing on enterprise reliability, security and scalability. The latest update to MLflow introduces innovative GenAI and LLMOps features that enhance its capability to manage and deploy large language models (LLMs). This expanded LLM support is achieved through new integrations with industry-standard LLM tools OpenAI and Hugging Face Transformers — as well as the MLflow Deployments Server. Additionally, MLflow’s integration with LLM frameworks (e.g., LangChain) enables simplified model development for creating generative AI applications for a variety of use cases, including chatbots, document summarization, text classification, sentiment analysis and beyond.
Benefits
Model development
Enhance and expedite machine learning lifecycle management with a standardized framework for production-ready models. Managed MLflow Recipes enable seamless ML project bootstrapping, rapid iteration and large-scale model deployment. Craft applications like chatbots, document summarization, sentiment analysis and classification effortlessly. Easily develop generative AI apps (e.g., chatbots, doc summarization) with MLflow’s LLM offerings, which seamlessly integrate with LangChain, Hugging Face and OpenAI.
Experiment tracking
Run experiments with any ML library, framework or language, and automatically keep track of parameters, metrics, code and models from each experiment. By using MLflow on Databricks, you can securely share, manage and compare experiment results along with corresponding artifacts and code versions — thanks to built-in integrations with the Databricks workspace and notebooks. You will also be able to evaluate the results of GenAI experiments and improve quality with MLflow evaluation functionality.
Model management
Use one central place to discover and share ML models, collaborate on moving them from experimentation to online testing and production, integrate with approval and governance workflows and CI/CD pipelines, and monitor ML deployments and their performance. The MLflow Model Registry facilitates sharing of expertise and knowledge, and helps you stay in control.
Model deployment
Quickly deploy production models for batch inference on Apache Spark™ or as REST APIs using built-in integration with Docker containers, Azure ML or Amazon SageMaker. With Managed MLflow on Databricks, you can operationalize and monitor production models using Databricks jobs scheduler and auto-managed clusters to scale based on the business needs.
The latest upgrades to MLflow seamlessly package GenAI applications for deployment. You can now deploy your chatbots and other GenAI applications such as document summarization, sentiment analysis and classification at scale, using Databricks Model Serving.
Features
MLflow Tracking
MLFLOW TRACKING: Automatically log parameters, code versions, metrics, and artifacts for each run using Python, REST, R API, and Java API
GENERATIVE AI DEVELOPMENT: Simplify model development to build GenAI applications for a variety of use cases such as chatbots, document summarization, sentiment analysis and classification with MLflow’s Deployments Server and Evaluation UI, supported by native integration with LangChain, and seamless UI for fast prototyping and iteration.
MLFLOW TRACKING SERVER: Get started quickly with a built-in tracking server to log all runs and experiments in one place. No configuration needed on Databricks.
EXPERIMENT MANAGEMENT: Create, secure, organize, search and visualize experiments from within the workspace with access control and search queries.
MLFLOW RUN SIDEBAR: Automatically track runs from within notebooks and capture a snapshot of your notebook for each run so that you can always go back to previous versions of your code.
LOGGING DATA WITH RUNS: Log parameters, datasets, metrics, artifacts and more as runs to local files, to a SQLAlchemy compatible database, or remotely to a tracking server.
DELTA LAKE INTEGRATION: Track large-scale datasets that fed your models with Delta Lake snapshots.
ARTIFACT STORE: Store large files such as S3 buckets, shared NFS file system, and models in Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, SFTP server, NFS, and local file paths.
MLflow Models
MLFLOW MODELS: A standard format for packaging machine learning models that can be used in a variety of downstream tools — for example, real-time serving through a REST API or batch inference on Apache Spark.
MODEL CUSTOMIZATION: Use Custom Python Models and Custom Flavors for models from an ML library that is not explicitly supported by MLflow’s built-in flavors.
BUILT-IN MODEL FLAVORS: MLflow provides several standard flavors that might be useful in your applications, like Python and R functions, Hugging Face, OpenAI and LangChain, PyTorch, Spark MLlib, TensorFlow and ONNX.
BUILT-IN DEPLOYMENT TOOLS: Quickly deploy on Databricks via Apache Spark UDF for a local machine, or several other production environments such as Microsoft Azure ML, Amazon SageMaker, and building Docker Images for Deployment.
MLflow Model Registry
CENTRAL REPOSITORY: Register MLflow models with the MLflow Model Registry. A registered model has a unique name, version, stage and other metadata.
MODEL VERSIONING: Automatically keep track of versions for registered models when updated.
MODEL STAGE: Assign preset or custom stages to each model version, like “Staging” and “Production” to represent the lifecycle of a model.
CI/CD WORKFLOW INTEGRATION: Record stage transitions, request, review and approve changes as part of CI/CD pipelines for better control and governance.
MODEL STAGE TRANSITIONS: Record new registration events or changes as activities that automatically log users, changes, and additional metadata such as comments.
MLflow Deployments Server
GOVERN ACCESS TO LLMS: Manage SaaS LLM credentials.
CONTROL COSTS: Set up rate limits.
STANDARDIZE LLM INTERACTIONS: Experiment with different OSS/SaaS LLMs with standard input/output interfaces for different tasks: completions, chat, embeddings.
MLflow Projects
MLFLOW PROJECTS: MLflow projects allow you to specify the software environment that is used to execute your code. MLflow currently supports the following project environments: Conda environment, Docker container environment, and system environment. Any Git repo or local directory can be treated as an MLflow project.
REMOTE EXECUTION MODE: Run MLflow Projects from Git or local sources remotely on Databricks clusters using the Databricks CLI to quickly scale your code.
MLflow Recipes
SIMPLIFIED PROJECT STARTUP: MLflow Recipes provides out-of-box connected components for building and deploying ML models.
ACCELERATED MODEL ITERATION: MLflow Recipes creates standardized, reusable steps for model iteration — making the process faster and less expensive.
AUTOMATED TEAM HANDOFFS: Opinionated structure provides modularized production-ready code, enabling automatic handoff from experimentation to production.
See our Product News from Azure Databricks and AWS to learn more about our latest features.
Comparing MLflow offerings
Open Source MLflow | Managed MLflow on Databricks | |
|---|---|---|
Experiment Tracking | ||
MLflow tracking API | ||
MLflow tracking server | Self-hosted | Fully managed |
Notebooks integration | ||
Workflows integration | ||
Reproducible Projects | ||
MLflow Projects | ||
Git and Conda integration | ||
Scalable cloud/clusters for project runs | ||
Model Management | ||
MLflow Model Registry | ||
Model versioning | ||
ACL-based stage transition | ||
CI/CD workflow integrations | ||
Flexible Deployment | ||
Built-in batch inference | ||
MLflow Models | ||
Built-in streaming analytics | ||
Security and Management | ||
High availability | ||
Automated updates | ||
Role-based access control |
How it works
MLflow is a lightweight set of APIs and user interfaces that can be used with any ML framework throughout the Machine Learning workflow. It includes four components: MLflow Tracking, MLflow Projects, MLflow Models and MLflow Model Registry
Managed MLflow on Databricks
Managed MLflow on Databricks is a fully managed version of MLflow providing practitioners with reproducibility and experiment management across Databricks Notebooks, jobs and data stores, with the reliability, security and scalability of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
