Building a model registry in GitHub
Data science projects can be messy. We try out something here, just to find out that it didn't really help. Then we try out another thing, and maybe it does improve performance a little bit. Most of the code that we write in these projects needs to run once and can be forgotten afterwards. As long as we know what the general outcome (e.g. a trained model) of this approach was, we don't need to actually maintain it. The only exception is that we occasionally need to re-train a model as new data has been collected.
Production software systems are quite different from this. New requirements usually mean that we need to be able to change the code in one place without affecting other parts of the system. Running machine learning models in production therefore requires a fairly clear separation between the data science world of experimentation and the rigid world of maintainable production code. This separation can be achieved by treating machine learning models as—more or less—abstract, exchangeable artifacts, while the backend, on which these models run, only operates on these abstractions.