[FR] [Roadmap] Create a detailed example of creating a custom model flavor

MLflow Roadmap Item

This is an MLflow Roadmap item that has been prioritized by the MLflow maintainers. We’ve identified this feature as a highly requested addition to the MLflow package based on community feedback. We’re seeking a community contribution for the implementation of this feature and will enthusiastically support the development and review of a submitted PR for this.

Contribution Note

As with other roadmap items, there may be a desire for multiple contributors to work on an issue. While we don’t discourage collaboration, we strongly encourage that a primary contributor is assigned to roadmap issues to simplify the merging process. The items on the roadmap are of a high priority. Due to the wide-spread demand of roadmap features, we encourage potential contributors to only agree to take on the work of creating a PR, making changes, and ensuring that test coverage is adequately created for the feature if they are willing and able to see the implementation through to a merged state.

Feature scope

This roadmap feature’s complexity is classified as:

• good-first-issue: This feature is limited in complexity and effort required to implement.
• simple: This feature does not require a large amount of effort to implement and / or is clear enough to not need a design discussion with maintainers.
• involved: This feature will require a substantial amount of development effort but does not require an agreed-upon design from the maintainers. The feedback given during the PR phase may be involved and necessitate multiple iterations before approval. (Please bear with us as we collaborate with you to make a great contribution)
• design-recommended: This is a substantial feature that should have a design document approved prior to working on an implementation (to save your time, not ours). After agreeing to work on this feature, a maintainer will be assigned to support you throughout the development process.

Proposal Summary

The current example for custom model flavors is inadequate as a guide. This is a common question that gets raised amongst users. This FR is a request to create a much more in-depth example of a custom model flavor that shows its construction in-line within the docs, provides explanations for what is required, and shows usage of it with a screenshot of the model within the UI (namely the serialized model artifact within the run page). Custom flavors should be introduced as separate GitHub repositories with documentation provided in https://mlflow.org/docs/latest/plugins.html#community-plugins.

Motivation

What is the use case for this feature?

Provide an example and better explanation for a common ask that users struggle with.

Why is this use case valuable to support for MLflow users in general?

Many users ask how to do this to incorporate a non-officially supported model flavor or request inclusion of esoteric libraries that will not be considered for official inclusion into MLflow due to low usage.

What component(s), interfaces, languages, and integrations does this feature affect?

Components

• area/artifacts: Artifact stores and artifact logging
• area/build: Build and test infrastructure for MLflow
• area/docs: MLflow documentation pages
• area/examples: Example code
• area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• area/models: MLmodel format, model serialization/deserialization, flavors
• area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• area/scoring: MLflow Model server, model deployment tools, Spark UDFs
• area/server-infra: MLflow Tracking server backend
• area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging

Interfaces

• area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, plotting, JavaScript, JavaScript dev server
• area/docker: Docker use across MLflow’s components, such as MLflow Projects and MLflow Models
• area/sqlalchemy: Use of SQLAlchemy in the Tracking Service or Model Registry
• area/windows: Windows support

Languages

• language/r: R APIs and clients
• language/java: Java APIs and clients
• language/new: Proposals for new client languages

Integrations

• integrations/azure: Azure and Azure ML integrations
• integrations/sagemaker: SageMaker integrations
• integrations/databricks: Databricks integrations

[lakshikaparihar]

@AMMAR-62 Yeah, it’s assigned to me today only. so I will start working on it.

[benjaminbluhm]

Hi @BenWilson2 thanks for clarification and explaining the scope of having in-depth step-by-step walkthrough. After your feedback yesterday I connected with @aiwalter from sktime team, plan is to create custom model flavor for sktime (see feature request in their repo). I think sktime could be a nice candidate for this FR given it is a very popular time series ML library. In case you like the idea and you can confirm that it is installable and testable within the examples test suite my suggestion would be to first work on custom flavor implementation in sktime and afterwards I could use my insights to work on this FR to provide a detailed step-by-step walkthrough for sktime.

In case you like more the idea from @lakshikaparihar I am also happy to hand over the issue and see if/how I can contribute