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Challenge 4 – Create a Release Pipeline In Azure DevOps

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Introduction

The Release pipeline demonstrates the automation of various stages/tasks involved in deploying an ML model and operationalizing the model in production. The stages generally constitute collecting the Build Artifacts, creating a web service and testing the web service. This web service that gets created in the Release Pipeline is a REST endpoint (a Scoring URI) used to predict/forecast on a new dataset. Additionally, it can be plugged into business applications to leverage the intelligence of the model.

There are several ways to create a Release pipeline. The two most common and popular ways are:

  • Using a YAML file that represents the entire pipeline.
  • Using a classic GUI pipeline & adding tasks sequentially.

Use whichever approach your team is most comfortable with.

We can setup Continuous Deployment (CID) trigger for every Release pipeline. The pipeline shows how to operationalize the scoring image and promote it safely across different environments.

Description

  • Create a Release pipeline.
  • Add Build Artifact that you created in the previous challenge.
    • Set Agent Pool to Azure Pipelines.
    • Set Agent Specification to ubuntu-18.04.
  • Add Release pipeline tasks:
    • Add a task to setup environment by using install_environment.sh file in environment_setup/ folder. This will install all the python modules required to deploy the forecasting model.
    • Add a task to deploy the scoring image on ACI using deployOnAci.py in service/code/ folder. A “healthy” ACI deployment will be created under Azure ML Endpoints. It contains a REST-based Scoring URI/Endpoint that you can call using Postman or Swagger.
      • NOTE: ACI is recommended to use testing or pre-production stages. Since bigger inferencing compute is needed in production for low latency and high throughput, it is recommended to use AKS cluster in production.
    • Add a task to test the ACI web service using AciWebserviceTest.py in service/code/ folder. This allows you to run the web service on new data (or test data) to forecast demand for new items.
      • NOTE: If the deployment fails or the web service is "unhealthy", check logs in Azure DevOps or Azure ML Studio for issues and additional information.

Success Criteria

  • An end-to-end Release pipeline in Azure DevOps.
  • A “healthy” ACI deployment is created under Azure ML Endpoints, which can be confirmed to be operational by using a tool like Postman or Swagger.

Tips

  • Finding the path to where Azure DevOps will copy your build artifact is often the hardest part.
    • You can use the following command in a Bash task to print all environment variables (which is how predefined variables are passed to your pipeline). 
      env | sort
    • You can use the following command in a Bash task to print a tree of the filesystem of your build agent. 
      find $(Pipeline.Workspace) -print | sed -e "s;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g"
  • Use the predefined variables in Azure DevOps to make your tasks simpler & more robust.
  • Make sure you specify the version of Python you want the tasks to use (Python 3.6, there is a task for this)
  • Use the Azure CLI task to run the Python scripts since they need to interact with the Azure Machine Learning resource.
  • If using YAML pipelines, make sure you use the same name that you used for the Build pipeline in the Release pipeline pipeline.source.

Learning resources