I have been working on various machine learning models so far, but never yet on the deployment phase of an ML project. I have vaguely used Apache Airflow and I'm aware that it is a tool for scheduling DAGs, but I never set up such a scheduling on prod environment myself. Now I would like to gain a bit more knowledge on model deployment and orchestration, but currently I have no access to a company's dev/prod environment to experiment on.
My questions are:
- Once a ML solution is ready to go into production and has to be ran, say, every hour, where would it run exactly? Do companies that develop ML solutions typically rent out a cloud server, for instance on AWS, and connect their Airflow environment to that?
- In such case, do companies generally package the product in a Docker image?
- If I were to try out using Airflow scheduling on my home laptop, would it make any sense? Could I set up scheduled jobs? I imagine these jobs would only run if my laptop is switched on, else they would fail. Is my interpretation correct?
