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.

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Setup the Environment

• Create a virtualenv with Python 3.7 and activate it. Refer to this link for help on specifying the Python version in the virtualenv.

python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv
# You should have Python 3.7 available in your host. 
# Check the Python path using `which python3`
# Use a command similar to this one:
python3 -m virtualenv --python=<path-to-Python3.7> .devops
source .devops/bin/activate

• 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.

Files in Repository

1. run_docker.sh - Files to build and run docker image
2. upload_docker.sh - Files to upload images to docker hub
3. run_kubernetes.sh - Files to deploy to kubernetes
4. Makefile - Files to build application
5. app.py - Application file
6. requirements.txt - Python dependencies to run the app
7. output_txt_files/docker_out.txt - log output from Docker prediction
8. output_txt_files/kubernetes_out.txt - log output from Kubernetes-mediated prediction
9. model_data/ - Folder for Application Models
10. .circleci/ - Folder for Circleci Config File