We have been using the feature MLflow Model Registry Webhooks on Azure Databricks . Webhooks are in public preview, but oddly are deprecated at the same time with the introduction of Unity Catalog. The documentation says "For an alternative, see Can I use stage transition requests or trigger webhooks on events?." but that page does not in fact describe a real alternative. Using webhooks allows us to hook specific events like MODEL_VERSION_CREATED. There doesn't appear to be any equivalent feature in Unity Catalog (UC).
After some digging, I see two main alternatives:
- Run a periodic job that polls UC for new model versions
- Use audit log streaming to detect new model versions
Recommendations? Option #1 is simpler but polling is inefficient and introduces latency. Option #2 is more elegant and scalable but is also complex. For example, audit logging must be turned on; raw audit logs have to go somewhere; Unity Catalog needs to load those audit logs; audit log storage is not cloud-agnostic.
Sad to see webhooks going away and hope that Databricks will create a similar capability for Unity Catalog.
