A Look at Machine Learning Model Deployment as an API

xpresso ai
3 min readJun 24, 2022

The theory of deploying machine learning models is now well understood. However, not many people understand the nuances needed to do machine learning deployment practically. If you want to deploy machine learning model, you need to understand how to do it in a practical way. That means understanding the Python programming language and the various environments you can use to ensure it works correctly. For example, Flask is one of the many tools you can use to develop APIs when doing machine learning model deployment.

The big thing is to focus on how to deploy your machine learning models. Deploying as an API is quite difficult, which is why you have to be careful when thinking about what to do. However, deploying an API allows you to scale much more quickly than any other way. How to deploy model in production? It all starts with ensuring that your model works correctly. The next step is to decide what you are going to do. Most machine learning model deployment happens with software engineers creating new systems to make it work. However, you can also do everything as an API.

Deciding How to Deploy Your ML Model

The big thing with using an API is it allows you to focus on the architecture instead of on rewriting the model code. Deploying models into production is difficult because there are scientists and machine learning engineers have completely different toolkits. The machine learning engineer is more likely to use Python or some other practical tool to put a model into production.

Machine learning deployment is difficult because you need to either rewrite the code or use an API. Flask is a Python toolkit that allows you to deploy machine learning model code without worrying about changing anything else. You can have your application access your machine learning models as an API call.

Setting Up Your Python Environment

The first step in this process is a create a Python development environment. Anaconda is the virtual environment tool that many people use for Python. This allows you to do machine learning deployment relatively quickly by integrating all of that with Flask.

You can then integrate your typical Python code and add the necessary serialization. As you might recall, when working with APIs, you need to serialize and deserialize when moving things from one place to the next. This allows you to send your API calls as efficiently as possible. This is one of the best ways to ensure you are doing machine learning model deployment as well as possible.

Building Your API and Deploying

The final step in this process is to develop your API using Flask. This is one of the best things for deploying models into production. Machine learning model deployment is easy with the plethora of available tools. However, not everyone might be interested in building and deploying models on their own.

That is why tools like xpresso.ai exist. It essentially gives you everything you need to build and deploy a model successfully without worrying about any other downsides. It is easy to use, and you won’t have to worry about the intricacies that come from making the process work by yourself.

Originally published at https://xpresso.ai on June 24, 2022.

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