Models as Serverless Functions

I recently published Chapter 3 of my book-in-progress on leanpub. The goal with this chapter is to empower data scientists to leverage managed services to deploy models to production and own more of DevOps. Serverless technologies enable developers to write and deploy code without needing to worry about provisioning and maintaining servers. One of the most common uses of this technology is serverless functions, which makes it much easier to author code that can scale to match variable workloads. With serverless function environments, you write a function that the runtime supports, specify a list of dependencies, and then deploy the function to production. The cloud platform is responsible for provisioning servers, scaling up more machines to match demand, managing load balancers, and handling versioning. Since we've already explored hosting models as web endpoints, serverless functions are an excellent tool to utilize when you want to rapidly move from prototype to production for your predictive models. Serverless functions were first introduced on AWS in 2015 and GCP in 2016. Both of these systems provide a variety of triggers that can invoke functions and a number of outputs that the functions can trigger in response. While it's possible to use serverless functions to avoid writing complex code for gluing different components together in a cloud platform, we'll explore a much narrower use case in this chapter.