How Amazon SageMaker improves efficiency of machine learning models

Taking machine learning models from conceptualization to production is complex and time-consuming. Companies need to handle a huge amount of data to train the model, choose the best algorithm for training and manage the computing capacity while training it. Moreover, another major challenge is to deploy the models into a production environment.

Amazon SageMaker simplifies such complexities. It makes easier for businesses to build and deploy ML models. It offers the required underlying infrastructure to scale your ML models at petabyte level and easily test and deploy them to production.

The typical workflow of a machine learning project involves the following steps:

• Build: Define the problem, gather and clean data
• Train: Engineer the model to learn the patterns from the data
• Deploy: Deploy the model into a production system

This entire cycle is highly iterative. There are chances that the changes made at any stage of the process can loop back the progress to any state. Amazon SageMaker provides various built-in training algorithms and pre-trained models. You can choose the model according to your requirements for quick model training. This allows you to scale your ML workflow.

SageMaker offers Jupyter NoteBooks running R/Python kernels with a compute instance that you can choose as per the data engineering requirements. After data engineering, data scientists can easily train models using a different compute instance based on the model’s compute demand. The tool offers cost-effective solutions for:

• Provisioning hardware instances
• Running high-capacity data jobs
• Orchestrating the entire flow with simple commands
• Enabling serverless elastic deployment works with a few lines of code

Three main components of Amazon SageMaker

SageMaker allows data scientists, engineers and machine learning experts to efficiently build, train and host ML algorithms. This enables you to accelerate your ML models to production. It consists of three components:

• Authoring: you can run zero-setup hosted Jupyter notebook IDEs on general instance types or GPU-powered instances for data exploration, cleaning and pre-processing.
• Model training: you can use built-in supervised and unsupervised algorithms to train your own models. Amazon SageMaker trained models are not code dependent but data dependent. This enables easy deployment.
• Model hosting: to get real-time interferences, you can use AWS’ model hosting service with HTTPs endpoints. These endpoints can scale to support traffic and allow you do A/B testing on multiple models simultaneously.

Cost-efficient model training

Training deep learning models requires high GPU utilization. Moreover, the ML algorithms that are CPU-intensive should switch to another instance type with a higher CPU:GPU ratio.

With AWS SageMaker heterogeneous clusters, data engineers can easily train the models with multiple instance types. This takes some of the CPU tasks from the GPU instances and transfers them to dedicated compute-optimized CPU instances. This ensures higher GPU utilization as well as faster and more cost-efficient training.

Rich algorithm library

Once you have defined a use case for your machine learning project, you can choose an appropriate built-in algorithm offered by SageMaker that is valid for your respective problem type. It provides a wide range of pre-trained models, pre-built solution templates and examples relevant for various problem types.

ML community

With AWS ML researchers, customers, influencers and experts, SageMaker offers a niche ML community where data scientists and engineers come together to discuss ML uses and issues. It offers a range of videos, blogs and tutorials to help accelerate ML model deployment.

ML community is a place to discuss, learn and chat with experts and influencers regarding machine learning algorithms.

Pay-as-you-use model

One of the best advantages of Amazon SageMaker is the fee structure. Amazon SageMaker is free to try. As a part of AWS Free Tier, you can get started with Amazon SageMaker for free. Moreover, once the trial period is over, you need to pay only for what you use.

You have two types of payment choices:

• On-demand pricing – it offers no minimum fees. You can utilize SageMaker services without any upfront commitments.
• SageMaker savings plans – AWS offers a flexible, usage-based pricing model. You need to pay a consistent amount of usage in return.

If you use a computing instance for a few seconds, billed at a few dollars per hour, you will still be charged only for the seconds you use the instance. Compared to other cloud-based self-managed solutions, SageMaker provides at least 54% lower total cost of ownership over three years.

Building machine learning models is a continuous cycle. Even after deploying a model, you should monitor inferences and evaluate the model to identify drift. This ensures an increase in the accuracy of the model. Amazon SageMaker, with its built-in library of algorithms, accelerates building and deploying machine learning models at scale.

Amazon SageMaker offers the following benefits:

• Scalability
• Flexibility
• High-performing built-in ML models
• Cost-effective solutions

Softweb Solutions offers Amazon SageMaker consulting services to address your machine learning challenges. Talk to our SageMaker consultants to know more about its applications for your business.

Originally published at www.softwebsolutions.com on November 28th, 2022.