topic Re: How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage in Machine Learning

How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage

johndoe99012 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 07:14:14 GMT

Hello everyone

I am following this notebook tutorial

https://docs.databricks.com/en/machine-learning/manage-model-lifecycle/index.html#example-notebook

Now I can register a machine learning model in Unity Catalog, but the tutorial only shows how to use that from databricks inside.

How could I deploy the model for external usage, for instance, to call the model via an API from my computer (similar to AWS API Gateway)?

Many thanks

Re: How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage

filipniziol — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:32:09 GMT

Hi @johndoe99012 ,

If you want to make a registered Databricks model accessible via external calls—similar to how you might use AWS API Gateway—you can leverage Databricks Model Serving. This feature allows you to host a model as a REST endpoint and interact with it from outside Databricks.

Key Steps:

Enable Model Serving:
Ensure that your workspace is in a region where Model Serving is supported. You can find the list of supported regions here:
Azure Databricks Feature & Region Support – Model Serving
Deploy Your Model to a Serving Endpoint:
Once your model is registered in Unity Catalog, you can create a serving endpoint from the Databricks UI or via the CLI.
Databricks Documentation on Model Serving
Obtain the Endpoint URL and Authentication Credentials:
After the serving endpoint is live, Databricks provides a REST URL. You can call this URL from your external applications using standard HTTP requests. You'll need to include the appropriate authentication token.

Re: How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage

johndoe99012 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:36:57 GMT

Thank you for your great answer. I am trying to understand the pricing of Mosaic pricing schema and I found this URL: https://www.databricks.com/product/pricing/model-serving.

If I understand correctly, Mosaic will charge me similar to Lambda in AWS, i.e. I pay as I call Mosaic API.

Re: How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage

filipniziol — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:48:03 GMT

Hi @johndoe99012 ,

You pay for DBU-s.

If you select "scale to zero", you do not pay anything, but at the same time the endpoint is not started.
So the first HTTP request sent will take a while and this is not recommended for production.

If you select Small compute without scaling to zero you will be using 1-4 DBUs,
So when there are no requests or there are limited number of requests you will pay for 1 DBUs, so 0.07 USD as per documentation. If there are many requests and the endpoint is scaled-out to its max 4 DBUs, you will pay 4 x 0.07 USD = 0.28 USD per hour.

Re: How to serve a Unity Catalog ML model to external usage

filipniziol — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 18:02:33 GMT

Hi @johndoe99012

If the answer resolved your question, please consider marking it as the solution.

It helps others in the community find answers more easily.