ML in Production – What Does “Production” Even Mean?

We like talking about production – one famous, but probably wrong statement about it is “87% of data science projects never make it to production”. While giving a talk to a group of up-and-coming data scientists, a question that surprised me came up: "When you say “production”, what exactly do you mean?" Buzzwords are great, but all the cool kids know what production is, right? Wrong. In this talk, we’ll define what production actually means. I’ll present a first-principles, step-by-step approach to thinking about deploying a model to production. We’ll talk about challenges you might face in each step, and provide further reading if you want to dive deeper into each one.