Project Overview

In this project, you will apply the skills you have acquired in this course to operationalize a Machine Learning Microservice API.

You are given a pre-trained, sklearn model that has been trained to predict housing prices in Boston according to several features, such as average rooms in a home and data about highway access, teacher-to-pupil ratios, and so on. You can read more about the data, which was initially taken from Kaggle, on the data source site. This project tests your ability to operationalize a Python flask app—in a provided file, app.py—that serves out predictions (inference) about housing prices through API calls. This project could be extended to any pre-trained machine learning model, such as those for image recognition and data labeling.

Project Tasks

Your project goal is to operationalize this working, machine learning microservice using kubernetes, which is an open-source system for automating the management of containerized applications. In this project you will:

• Test your project code using linting
• Complete a Dockerfile to containerize this application
• Deploy your containerized application using Docker and make a prediction
• Improve the log statements in the source code for this application
• Configure Kubernetes and create a Kubernetes cluster
• Deploy a container using Kubernetes and make a prediction
• Upload a complete Github repo with CircleCI to indicate that your code has been tested

You can find a detailed project rubric, here.

The final implementation of the project will showcase your abilities to operationalize production microservices.

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Setup the Environment

• Create a virtualenv and activate it
• Run make install to install the necessary dependencies

Running app.py

1. Standalone: python app.py
2. Run in Docker: ./run_docker.sh
3. Run in Kubernetes: ./run_kubernetes.sh

Kubernetes Steps

• Setup and Configure Docker locally
• Setup and Configure Kubernetes locally
• Create Flask app in Container
• Run via kubectl

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Files

• app.py - The python application that returns predictions
• Dockerfile - Dockerfile used to build Docker image
• Makefile - Provides sets of instructions to be run with the make command
• make_prediction.sh - Script to quickly post data to the application
• model_data/ - Provided with the project. Training data?
• output_text_files/ - Output examples
  • docker_out.txt - Sample output from application running in Docker
  • kubernetes_out.txt - Sample Kubernetes output
• README.md - This file
• requirements.txt - A list of Python dependencies to be installed using make install
• run_docker.sh - Script to run the application locally in Docker
• run_kubernetes.sh - Script to run the application in a Minikube deployment
• upload_docker.sh - Script to upload Docker container to Docker Hub (must be run after run_docker.sh