Machine learning (ML) applications are complex to deploy and often require the ability to hyper-scale, and have ultra-low latency requirements and stringent cost budgets. Use cases such as fraud detection, product recommendations, and traffic prediction are examples where milliseconds matter and are critical for business success. Strict service level agreements (SLAs) need to be met, and a typical request may require multiple steps such as preprocessing, data transformation, feature engineering, model selection logic, model aggregation, and postprocessing.
Deploying ML models at scale with optimized cost and compute efficiencies can be a daunting and cumbersome task. Each model has its own merits and dependencies based on the external data sources as well as runtime environment such as CPU/GPU power of the underlying compute resources. An application may require multiple ML models to serve a single inference request. In certain scenarios, a request may flow across multiple models. There is no one-size-fits-all

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