ml – baeke.info

Creating and deploying a model with Azure Machine Learning Service

In this post, we will take a look at creating a simple machine learning model for text classification and deploying it as a container with Azure Machine Learning service. This post is not intended to discuss the finer details of creating a text classification model. In fact, we will use the Keras library and its Reuters newswire dataset to create a simple dense neural network. You can find many online examples based on this dataset. For further information, be sure to check out and buy 👍 Deep Learning with Python by François Chollet, the creator of Keras and now at Google. It contains a section that explains using this dataset in much more detail!

Machine Learning service workspace

To get started, you need an Azure subscription. Once you have the subscription, create a Machine Learning service workspace. Below, you see such a workspace:

Together with the workspace, you also get a storage account, a key vault, application insights and a container registry. In later steps, we will create a container and store it in this registry. That all happens behind the scenes though. You will just write a few simple lines of code to make that happen!

Note the Authoring (Preview) section! These were added just before Build 2019 started. For now, we will not use them.

Azure Notebooks

To create the model and interact with the workspace, we will use a free Jupyter notebook in Azure Notebooks. At this point in time (8 May 2019), Azure Notebooks is still in preview. To get started, find the link below in the Overview section of the Machine Learning service workspace:

To quickly get the notebook, you can clone my public project: ⏩⏩⏩ https://notebooks.azure.com/geba/projects/textclassificationblog.

Creating the model

When you open the notebook, you will see the following first four cells:

It’s always simple if a prepared dataset is handed to you like in the above example. Above, you simply use the reuters class of keras.datasets and use the load_data method to get the data and directly assign it to variables to hold the train and test data plus labels.

In this case, the data consists of newswires with a corresponding label that indicates the category of the newswire (e.g. an earnings call newswire). There are 46 categories in this dataset. In the real world, you would have the newswire in text format. In this case, the newswire has already been converted (preprocessed) for you in an array of integers, with each integer corresponding to a word in a dictionary.

A bit further in the notebook, you will find a Vectorization section:

In this section, the train and test data is vectorized using a one-hot encoding method. Because we specified, in the very first cell of the notebook, to only use the 10000 most important words each article can be converted to a vector with 10000 values. Each value is either 1 or 0, indicating the word is in the text or not.

This bag-of-words approach is one of the ways to represent text in a data structure that can be used in a machine learning model. Besides vectorizing the training and test samples, the categories are also one-hot encoded.

Now the dense neural network model can be created:

The above code defines a very simple dense neural network. A dense neural network is not necessarily the best type but that’s ok for this post. The specifics are not that important. Just note that the nn variable is our model. We will use this variable later when we convert the model to the ONNX format.

The last cell (16 above) does the actual training in 9 epochs. Training will be fast because the dataset is relatively small and the neural network is simple. Using the Azure Notebooks compute is sufficient. After 9 epochs, this is the result:

Not exactly earth-shattering: 78% accuracy on the test set!

Saving the model in ONNX format

ONNX is an open format to store deep learning models. When your model is in that format, you can use the ONNX runtime for inference.

Converting the Keras model to ONNX is easy with the onnxmltools:

The result of the above code is a file called reuters.onnx in your notebook project.

Predict with the ONNX model

Let’s try to predict the category of the first newswire in the test set. Its real label is 3, which means it’s a newswire about an earnings call (earn class):

We will use similar code later in score.py, a file that will be used in a container we will create to expose the model as an API. The code is pretty simple: start an inference session based on the reuters.onnx file, grab the input and output and use run to predict. The resulting array is the output of the softmax layer and we use argmax to extract the category with the highest probability.

Saving the model to the workspace

With the model in reuters.onnx, we can add it to the workspace:

You will need a file in your Azure Notebook project called config.json with the following contents:

{
     "subscription_id": "<subscription-id>",
     "resource_group": "<resource-group>",
     "workspace_name": "<workspace-name>" 
}

With that file in place, when you run cell 27 (see above), you will need to authenticate to Azure to be able to interact with the workspace. The code is pretty self-explanatory: the reuters.onnx model will be added to the workspace:

As you can see, you can save multiple versions of the model. This happens automatically when you save a model with the same name.

Creating the scoring container image

The scoring (or inference) container image is used to expose an API to predict categories of newswires. Obviously, you will need to give some instructions how scoring needs to be done. This is done via score.py:

The code is similar to the code we wrote earlier to test the ONNX model. score.py needs an init() and run() function. The other functions are helper functions. In init(), we need to grab a reference to the ONNX model. The ONNX model file will be placed in the container during the build process. Next, we start an InferenceSession via the ONNX runtime. In run(), the code is similar to our earlier example. It predicts via session.run and returns the result as JSON. We do not have to worry about the rest of the code that runs the API. That is handled by Machine Learning service.

Note: using ONNX is not a requirement; we could have persisted and used the native Keras model for instance

In this post, we only need score.py since we do not train our model via Azure Machine learning service. If you train a model with the service, you would create a train.py file to instruct how training should be done based on data in a storage account for instance. You would also provision compute resources for training. In our case, that is not required so we train, save and export the model directly from the notebook.

Training and scoring with Machine Learning service

Now we need to create an environment file to indicate the required Python packages and start the image build process:

Create an environment yml file via the API and build the container

The build process is handled by the service and makes sure the model file is in the container, in addition to score.py and myenv.yml. The result is a fully functional container that exposes an API that takes an input (a newswire) and outputs an array of probabilities. Of course, it is up to you to define what the input and output should be. In this case, you are expected to provide a one-hot encoded article as input.

The container image will be listed in the workspace, potentially multiple versions of it:

Container images for the reuters ONNX model

Deploy to Azure Container Instances

When the image is ready, you can deploy it via the Machine Learning service to Azure Container Instances (ACI) or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To deploy to ACI:

When the deployment is finished, the deployment will be listed:

When you click on the deployment, the scoring URI will be shown (e.g. http://IPADDRESS:80/score). You can now use Postman or any other method to score an article. To quickly test the service from the notebook:

The helper method run of aci_service will post the JSON in test_sample to the service. It knows the scoring URI from the deployment earlier.

Conclusion

Containerizing a machine learning model and exposing it as an API is made surprisingly simple with Azure Machine learning service. It saves time so you can focus on the hard work of creating a model that performs well in the field. In this post, we used a sample dataset and a simple dense neural network to illustrate how you can build such a model, convert it to ONNX format and use the ONNX runtime for scoring.

Creating and containerizing a TensorFlow Go application

In an earlier post, I discussed using a TensorFlow model from a Go application. With the TensorFlow bindings for Go, you can load a model that was exported with TensorFlow’s SavedModelBuilder module. That module saves a “snapshot” of a trained model which can be used for inference.

In this post, we will actually use the model in a web application. The application presents the user with a page to upload an image:

The class and its probability is displayed, including the processed image:

The source code of the application can be found at https://github.com/gbaeke/nasnet-go. If you just want to try the application, use Docker and issue the following command (replace port 80 with another port if there is a conflict):

docker run -p 80:9090 -d gbaeke/nasnet

The image is around 2.55GB in size so be patient when you first run the application. When the container has started, open your browser at http://localhost to see the upload page.

To quickly try it, you can run the container on Azure Container Instances. If you use the Portal, specify port 9090 as the container port.

A closer look at the appN

**UPDATE**: since first publication, the http handler code was moved into from main.go to handlers/handlers.go

In the init() function, the nasnet model is loaded with tf.LoadSavedModel. The ImageNet categories are also loaded with a call to getCategories() and stored in categories which is a map of int to a string array.

In main(), we simply print the TensorFlow version (1.12). Next, http.HandleFunc is used to setup a handler (upload func) when users connect to the root of the web app.

Naturally, most of the logic is in the upload function. In summary, it does the following:

when users just navigate to the page (HTTP GET verb), render the upload.gtpl template; that template contains the upload form and uses a bit of bootstrap to make it just a bit better looking (and that’s already an overstatement); to learn more about Go web templates, see this link.
when users submit a file (POST), the following happens:
- read the image
- convert the image to a tensor with the getTensor function; getTensor returns a *tf.Tensor; the tensor is created from a [1][224][224][3] array; note that each pixel value gets normalized by subtracting by 127.5 and then dividing by 127.5 which is the same preprocessing applied as in Keras (divide by 127.5 and subtract 1)
- run a session by inputting the tensor and getting the categories and probabilities as output
- look for the highest probability and save it, together with the category name in a variable of type ResultPageData (a struct)
- the struct data is used as input for the response.gtpl template

Note that the image is also shown in the output. The processed image (resized to 224×224) gets converted to a base64-encoded string. That string can be used in HTML image rendering as follows (where {{.Picture}} in the template will be replaced by the encoded string):

 <img src="data:image/jpg;base64,{{.Picture}}">

Note that the application lacks sufficient error checking to gracefully handle the upload of non-image files. Maybe I’ll add that later! 😉

Containerization

To containerize the application, I used the Dockerfile from https://github.com/tinrab/go-tensorflow-image-recognition but removed the step that downloads the InceptionV3 model. My application contains a ready to use NasnetMobile model.

The container image is based on tensorflow/tensorflow:1.12.0. It is further modified as required with the TensorFlow C API and the installation of Go. As discussed earlier, I uploaded a working image on Docker Hub.

Conclusion

Once you know how to use TensorFlow models from Go applications, it is easy to embed them in any application, from command-line tools to APIs to web applications. Although this application does server-side processing, you can also use a model directly in the browser with TensorFlow.js or ONNX.j s. For ONNX, try https://microsoft.github.io/onnxjs-demo/#/resnet50 to perform image classification with ResNet50 in the browser. You will notice that it will take a while to get started due to the model being downloaded. Once the model is downloaded, you can start classifying images. Personally, I prefer the server-side approach but it all depends on the scenario.

Using TensorFlow models in Go

Image via www.vpnsrus.com

In earlier posts, I discussed hosting a deep learning model such as Resnet50 on Kubernetes or Azure Container Instances. The model can then be used as any API which receives input as JSON and returns a result as JSON.

Naturally, you can also run the model in offline scenarios and directly from your code. In this post, I will take a look at calling a TensorFlow model from Go. If you want to follow along, you will need Linux or MacOS because the Go module does not support Windows.

Getting Ready

I installed an Ubuntu Data Science Virtual Machine on Azure and connected to it with X2Go:

Data Science Virtual Machine (Ubuntu) with X2Go

The virtual machine has all the required machine learning tools installed such as TensorFlow and Python. It also has Visual Studio Code. There are some extra requirements though:

Go: follow the instructions here to download and install Go
TensorFlow C API: follow the instructions here to download and install the C API; the TensorFlow package for Go requires this; it is recommended to also build and run the Hello from TensorFlow C program to verify that the library works (near the bottom of the instructions page)

After installing Go and the TensorFlow C API, install the TensorFlow Go package with the following command:

go get github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go

Test the package with go test:

go test github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go

The above command should return:

ok      github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go  0.104s

The go get command installed the package in $HOME/go/src/github.com if you did not specify a custom $GOPATH (see this wiki page for more info).

Getting a model

A model describes how the input (e.g. an image for image classification) gets translated to an output (e.g. a list of classes with probabilities). The model contains thousands or even millions of parameters which means a model can be quite large. In this example, we will use NASNetMobile which can be used to classify images.

Now we need some code to save the model in TensorFlow format so that it can be used from a Go program. The code below is based on the sample code on the NASNetMobile page from modeldepot.io. It also does a quick test inference on a cat image.

import keras
from keras.applications.nasnet import NASNetMobile
from keras.preprocessing import image
from keras.applications.xception import preprocess_input, decode_predictions
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
from keras import backend as K

sess = tf.Session()
K.set_session(sess)

model = NASNetMobile(weights="imagenet")
img = image.load_img('cat.jpg', target_size=(224,224))
img_arr = np.expand_dims(image.img_to_array(img), axis=0)
x = preprocess_input(img_arr)
preds = model.predict(x)
print('Prediction:', decode_predictions(preds, top=5)[0])

#save the model for use with TensorFlow
builder = tf.saved_model.builder.SavedModelBuilder("nasnet")

#Tag the model, required for Go
builder.add_meta_graph_and_variables(sess, ["atag"])
builder.save()
sess.close()

On the Ubuntu Data Science Virtual Machine, the above code should execute without any issues because all Python packages are already installed. I used the py35 conda environment. Use activate py35 to make sure you are in that environment.

The above code results in a nasnet folder, which contains the saved_model.pb file for the graph structure. The actual weights are in the variables subfolder. In total, the nasnet folder is around 38MB.

Great! Now we need a way to use the model from our Go program.

Using the saved model from Go

The model can be loaded with the LoadSavedModel function of the TensorFlow package. That package is imported like so:

import (
     tf "github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tensorflow/go"
)

LoadSavedModel is used like so:

model, err := tf.LoadSavedModel("nasnet",
         []string{"atag"}, nil)
if err != nil {
         log.Fatal(err)
}

The above code simply tries to load the model from the nasnet folder. We also need to specify the tag.

Next, we need to load an image and convert the image to a tensor with the following dimensions [1][224][224][3]. This is similar to my earlier ResNet50 post.

Now we need to pass the tensor to the model as input, and retrieve the class predictions as output. The following code achieves this:

output, err := model.Session.Run(
         map[tf.Output]*tf.Tensor{
             model.Graph.Operation("input_1").Output(0): input,
         },
         []tf.Output{
             model.Graph.Operation("predictions/Softmax").Output(0),
         },
         nil,
)
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

What the heck is this? The run method is defined as follows:

func (s *Session) Run(feeds map[Output]*Tensor, fetches []Output, targets []*Operation) ([]*Tensor, error)

When you build a model, you can give names to tensors and operations. In this case the input tensor (of dimensions [1][224][224][3]) is called input_1 and needs to be specified as a map. The inference operation is called predictions/Softmax and the output needs to be specified as an array.

The actual predictions can be retrieved from the output variable:

predictions, ok := output[0].Value().([][]float32)
if !ok {
         log.Fatal(fmt.Sprintf("output has unexpected type %T", output[0].Value()))
}

If you are not very familiar with Go, the code above uses type assertion to verify that predictions is a 2-dimensional array of float32. If the type assertion succeeds, the predictions variable will contain the actual predictions: [[<probability class 1 (tench)>, <probability class 2 (goldfish)>, …]]

You can now simply find the top prediction(s) in the array and match them with the list of classes for NASNet (actually the ImageNet classes). I get the following output with a cat image:

If you are wondering what image I used:

Conclusion

With Go’s TensorFlow bindings, you can load TensorFlow models from disk and use them for inference locally, without having to call a remote API. We used Python to prepare the model with some help from Keras.

Using the Microsoft Face API to detect emotions in photos and video

⚠️ IMPORTANT: the Face API container was retired early 2021. The container image is not available anymore.

In a previous post, I blogged about detecting emotions with the ONNX FER+ model. As an alternative, you can use cloud models hosted by major cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Besides those, there are many other services to choose from.

To detect facial emotions with Azure, there is a Face API in two flavours:

Cloud: API calls are sent to a cloud-hosted endpoint in the selected deployment region
Container: API calls are sent to a container that you deploy anywhere, including the edge (e.g. IoT Edge device)

To use the container version, you need to request access via this link. In another blog post, I already used the Text Analytics container to detect sentiment in a piece of text.

Note that the container version is not free and needs to be configured with an API key. The API key is obtained by deploying the Face API in the cloud. Doing so generates a primary and secondary key. Be aware that the Face API container, like the Text Analytics container, needs connectivity to the cloud to ensure proper billing. It cannot be used in completely offline scenarios. In short, no matter the flavour you use, you need to deploy the Face API. It will appear in the portal as shown below:

Deployed Face API (part of Cognitive Services)

Using the API is a simple matter. An image can be delivered to the API in two ways:

Link: just provide a URL to an image
Octet-stream: POST binary data (the image’s bytes) to the API

In the Go example you can find on GitHub, the second approach is used. You simply open the image file (e.g. a jpg or png) and pass the byte array to the endpoint. The endpoint is in the following form for emotion detection:

https://westeurope.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/face/v1.0/detect?returnFaceAttributes=emotion

Instead of emotion, you can ask for other attributes or a combination of attributes: age, gender, headPose, smile, facialHair, glasses, emotion, hair, makeup, occlusion, accessories, blur, exposure and noise. You simply add them together with +’s (e.g. emotion+age+gender). When you add attributes, the cost per call will increase slightly as will the response time. With the additional attributes, the Face API is much more useful than the simple FER+ model. The Face API has several additional features such as storing and comparing faces. Check out the documentation for full details.

To detect emotion in a video, the sample at https://github.com/gbaeke/emotion/blob/master/main.go contains some commented out code in the import section and around line 100 so you can use the Face API via the github.com/gbaeke/emotion/faceapi/msface package’s GetEmotion() function instead of the GetEmotion() function in the code. Because we have the full webcam image and face in an OpenCV mat, some extra code is needed to serialize it to a byte stream in a format the Face API understands:

encodedImage, _ := gocv.IMEncode(gocv.JPEGFileExt, face)       
emotion, err = msface.GetEmotion(bytes.NewReader(encodedImage))

In the above example, the face region detected by OpenCV is encoded to a JPG format as a byte slice. The byte slice is simply converted to an io.Reader and handed to the GetEmotion() function in the msface package.

When you use the Face API to detect emotions in a video stream from a webcam (or a video file), you will be hitting the API quite hard. You will surely need the standard tier of the API which allows you to do 10 transactions per second. To add face and emotion detection to video, the solution discussed in Detecting Emotions in FER+ is a better option.

Recognizing images with Azure Machine Learning and the ONNX ResNet50v2 model

Featured image from: https://medium.com/comet-app/review-of-deep-learning-algorithms-for-object-detection-c1f3d437b852

In a previous post, I discussed the creation of a container image that uses the ResNet50v2 model for image classification. If you want to perform tasks such as localization or segmentation, there are other models that serve that purpose. The image was built with GPU support. Adding GPU support was pretty easy:

Use the enable_gpu flag in the Azure Machine Learning SDK or check the GPU box in the Azure Portal; the service will build an image that supports NVIDIA cuda
Add GPU support in your score.py file and/or conda dependencies file (scoring script uses the ONNX runtime, so we added the onnxruntime-gpu package)

In this post, we will deploy the image to a Kubernetes cluster with GPU nodes. We will use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for this purpose. Check my previous post if you want to use NVIDIA V100 GPUs. In this post, I use hosts with one V100 GPU.

To get started, make sure you have the Kubernetes cluster deployed and that you followed the steps in my previous post to create the GPU container image. Make sure you attached the cluster to the workspace’s compute.

Deploy image to Kubernetes

Click the container image you created from the previous post and deploy it to the Kubernetes cluster you attached to the workspace by clicking + Create Deployment:

Starting the deployment from the image in the workspace

The Create Deployment screen is shown. Select AKS as deployment target and select the Kubernetes cluster you attached. Then press Create.

Azure Machine Learning now deploys the containers to Kubernetes. Note that I said containers in plural. In addition to the scoring container, another front–end container is added as well. You send your requests to the front-end container using HTTP POST. The front-end container talks to the scoring container over TCP port 5001 and passes the result back. The front-end container can be configured with certificates to support SSL.

Check the deployment and wait until it is healthy. We did not specify advanced settings during deployment so the default settings were chosen. Click the deployment to see the settings:

Deployment settings including authentication keys and scoring URI

As you can see, the deployment has authentication enabled. When you send your HTTP POST request to the scoring URI, make sure you pass an authentication header like so: bearer primary-or-secondary-key. The primary and secondary key are in the settings above. You can regenerate those keys at any time.

Checking the deployment

From the Azure Cloud Shell, issue the following commands in order to list the pods deployed to your Kubernetes cluster:

az aks list -o table
az aks get-credentials -g RESOURCEGROUP -n CLUSTERNAME
kubectl get pods

Azure Machine Learning has deployed three front-ends (default; can be changed via Advanced Settings during deployment) and one scoring container. Let’s check the container with: kubectl get pod onnxgpu-5d6c65789b-rnc56 -o yaml. Replace the container name with yours. In the output, you should find the following:

resources:
       limits:
         nvidia.com/gpu: "1"
       requests:
         cpu: 100m
         memory: 500m
         nvidia.com/gpu: "1"

The above allows the pod to use the GPU on the host. The nvidia drivers on the host are mapped to the pod with a volume:

volumeMounts:
     - mountPath: /usr/local/nvidia
       name: nvidia

Great! We did not have to bother with doing this ourselves. Let’s now try to recognize an image by sending requests to the front-end pods.

Recognizing images

To recognize an image, we need to POST a JSON payload to the scoring URI. The scoring URI can be found in the deployment properties in the workspace. In my case, the URI is:

http://23.97.218.34/api/v1/service/onnxgpu/score

The JSON payload needs to be in the below format:

{"data": [[[[143.06100463867188, 130.22100830078125, 122.31999969482422, ... ]]]]}

The data field is a multi-dimensional array, serialized to JSON. The shape of the array is (1,3,224,224). The dimensions correspond to the batch size, channels (RGB), height and width.

You only have to read an image and put the pixel values in the array! Easy right? Well, as usual the answer is: “it depends”! The easiest way to do it, according to me, is with Python and a collection of helper packages. The code is in the following GitHub gist: https://gist.github.com/gbaeke/b25849f3813e9eb984ee691659d1d05a. You need to run the code on a machine with Python 3 installed. Make sure you also install Keras and NumPy (pip3 install keras / pip3 install numpy). The code uses two images, cat.jpg and car.jpg but you can use your own. When I run the code, I get the following result:

Using TensorFlow backend.
 channels_last
 Loading and preprocessing image… cat.jpg
 Array shape (224, 224, 3)
 Array shape afer moveaxis:  (3, 224, 224)
 Array shape after expand_dims (1, 3, 224, 224)
 prediction time (as measured by the scoring container) 0.025304794311523438
 Probably a:  Egyptian_cat 0.9460222125053406
 Loading and preprocessing image… car.jpg
 Array shape (224, 224, 3)
 Array shape afer moveaxis:  (3, 224, 224)
 Array shape after expand_dims (1, 3, 224, 224)
 prediction time (as measured by the scoring container) 0.02526378631591797
 Probably a:  sports_car 0.948998749256134

It takes about 25 milliseconds to classify an image, or 40 images/second. By increasing the number of GPUs and scoring containers (we only deployed one), we can easily scale out the solution.

With a bit of help from Keras and NumPy, the code does the following:

check the image format reported by the keras back-end: it reports channels_last which means that, by default, the RGB channels are the last dimensions of the image array
load the image; the resulting array has a (224,224,3) shape
our container expects the channels_first format; we use moveaxis to move the last axis to the front; the array now has a (3,224,224) shape
our container expects a first dimension with a batch size; we use expand_dims to end up with a (1,3,224,224) shape
we convert the 4D array to a list and construct the JSON payload
we send the payload to the scoring URI and pass an authorization header
we get a JSON response with two fields: result and time; we print the inference time as reported by the container
from keras.applications.resnet50, we use the decode_predictions class to process the result field; result contains the 1000 values computed by the softmax function in the container; decode_predictions knows the categories and returns the first five
we print the name and probability of the category with the highest probability (item 0)

What happens when you use a scoring container that uses the CPU? In that case, you could run the container in Azure Container Instances (ACI). Using ACI is much less costly! In ACI with the default setting of 0.1 CPU, it will take around 2 seconds to score an image. Ouch! With a full CPU (in ACI), the scoring time goes down to around 180-220ms per image. To achieve better results, simply increase the number of CPUs. On the Standard_NC6s_v3 Kubernetes node with 6 cores, scoring time with CPU hovers around 60ms.

Conclusion

In this post, you have seen how Azure Machine Learning makes it straightforward to deploy GPU scoring images to a Kubernetes cluster with GPU nodes. The service automatically configures the resource requests for the GPU and maps the NVIDIA drivers to the scoring container. The only thing left to do is to start scoring images with the service. We have seen how easy that is with a bit of help from Keras and NumPy. In practice, always start with CPU scoring and scale out that solution to match your requirements. But if you do need GPUs for scoring, Azure Machine Learning makes it pretty easy to do so!

Creating a GPU container image for scoring with Azure Machine Learning

In a previous post, I discussed how you can add an existing Kubernetes cluster to an Azure Machine Learning workspace. Adding an existing cluster is necessary when the workspace does not support auto creation of a cluster. That is the case when you want to use the Standard_NC6s_v3 virtual machine image. I also used a container for scoring pictures with the ResNet50v2 model from the ONNX Model Zoo. Now we will take a look at actually creating that container image with GPU support. Note that in many cases, inference with CPUs is more than sufficient but the GPU case is more interesting to look at!

To get started, you need an Azure subscription with an Azure Machine Learning workspace. Take a look here for instructions.

Once you have a workspace, there are a few steps to take. If you look at the diagram at the top of this post, we will perform the steps starting from Register and manage your model:

Register model: we will add the Resnet50v2 model from the ONNX Model Zoo; we are using this existing model instead of our own; ResNet50v2 can recognize pictures in 1000 categories
Create container image: from the model in the workspace, we create a container image with GPU support
Deploy container image: from the image in the workspace, we deploy the image to compute that supports GPUs

Machine Learning SDK

The Azure Machine Learning service has a Machine Learning SDK for Python. All the steps discussed above can be performed with code. You can find an example of the Python code to use in the following Jupyter notebook hosted on Azure Notebooks: https://gebaml-geba.notebooks.azure.com/j/notebooks/ONNXResnet.ipynb. Note that the Azure Notebooks service is still in preview and a bit rough around the edges. The Machine Learning SDK is available by default in Azure Notebooks.

At the beginning of the notebook, we import azureml.core which allows you to check the version of the SDK (among other things):

Registering the model

First, we download the model to the notebook project. In the notebook, the urllib module is used to download the compressed version of the ResNet50v2 model. The tarball is untarred in resnet50v2/resnet50v2.onnx. You should see the model as a complex function with, in this case, millions of parameters (weights). The input to the function are the pixels of your picture (their red, green and blue values). The output of the function is a category: cat, guitar, …

Now that we have the model, we need to add it to the workspace, which means we also have to authenticate. Create a file called config.json with the following contents:

{
"subscription_id": "your Azure subscription ID",                          "resource_group": "your Azure ML resource group",
"workspace_name": "your Azure ML workspace name"
}

With the Workspace class from azureml.core we authenticate to Azure and grab a reference to the workspace with the ws variable. The Workspace.from_config() function searches for the config.json file.

Now we can finally register the model in the workspace using Model.register:

The above is the same as adding a model using the Azure Portal. You might hit file upload limits in the portal so adding the model via code is the better approach. Your model is now registered in the workspace:

Creating a GPU container image from the model

Now that we have the model, we can create the container image. The model will be included in the image which will add about 100MB to its size. The container image in Azure Machine Learning is created from four settings/artifacts:

model: registered in the workspace
score file: a file score.py with an init() and run() function; helper functions can also be included
dependency file: used to indicate the Python modules that need to be installed in the image (see https://conda.io/docs/)
GPU support: set to True or False

You will find the score file in the notebook. It was copied from a Microsoft supplied sample. If you do not have some experience with Machine Learning and neural networks (in this case), it will be difficult to create this from scratch. The ResNet50v2 model expects a 4-dimensional tensor with the following dimensions:

0: batch (1 when you send 1 image)
1: channels (3 channels for red, green and blue; RGB)
2: height (224 pixels)
3: width (224 pixels)

For inference, you will actually send the above data in a JSON payload as the data field. The preprocess() function in score.py grabs the data field and converts it to a NumPy array. The data is then normalized by dividing each pixel by 255, subtracting the mean values (of each channel) and dividing by the standard deviation (of each channel) . The normalized data is then sent to the model which outputs an array with 1000 probabilities that sum to 1 (via a softmax function).

Why are there a thousand probabilities? The model was trained on a thousand different categories of images and for each of these categories, a probability is output. After inference we will need a list of these categories so we can find the one that matches with our uploaded image and that has the highest probability!

This particular score.py file uses the ONNX runtime for inference. To enable GPU support, make sure you include the onnxruntime-gpu package in your conda dependencies as shown below:

With score.py and myenv.yml, the container image with GPU support can be created. Note that we are specifying the score.py file, the conda file and the model. GPU support is enabled as well via enable_gpu=True.

The code above should result in the following image in your workspace (after several minutes of building):

In the background, this image is stored in the container registry that got created when you deployed the Azure Machine Learning workspace. You are now ready for the third step, deploying the image to compute that supports GPUs (for instance Kubernetes). That step, together with some code to actually recognize images, will be for another post. In that post, we will also compare CPU to GPU speed.

Conclusion

In this post, we looked at creating a scoring (inference) container image with GPU support. Instead of creating and using our own model, we used the ResNet50v2 model from the ONNX Model Zoo. The model file, together with a score.py file and conda dependency file was used to build a container image. Azure Machine Learning builds the container image for you and stores it in a container registry. Although Azure Machine Learning takes care of most of the infrastructure work, you still need to know how to write the scoring file. In this post, the scoring file uses the ONNX runtime but you can use other runtimes or frameworks such as TensorFlow or MXNET.

Machine Learning service workspace

Azure Notebooks

Creating the model

Saving the model in ONNX format

Predict with the ONNX model

Saving the model to the workspace

Creating the scoring container image

Deploy to Azure Container Instances

Conclusion

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A closer look at the appN

Containerization

Conclusion

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Getting Ready

Getting a model

Using the saved model from Go

Conclusion

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Deploy image to Kubernetes

Checking the deployment

Recognizing images

Conclusion

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Machine Learning SDK

Registering the model

Creating a GPU container image from the model

Conclusion

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