
Seldon – Serves predictions via a REST API - pigloo
https://github.com/SeldonIO/seldon-server
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ahousley
Hey folks, thanks for your interest in Seldon. It's exciting to see all of our
hard work come to life!

Our plan is to build out and support the strongest ecosystem of data
scientists in the predictive machine learning space. We adopted the permissive
Apache 2.0 license, so you are free to build domain-specific algorithms and
functionality to either contribute back into the core platform or release
under a separate license.

We would love to hear your feedback, both first impressions and thoughts as
you start using the platform. And, of course, how you would like to see the
project evolve in the long term.

Suggestions on the functionality that you would find useful would also be
appreciated - we're hooked on customer and developer community feedback! :)

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hassanfarid
Alex, The idea is very cool and I am glad that the developments are going to
be contributed to an open source version.

As a developer while we can try VM setup and as well as Amazon instance, can
you also host it on one of your server and provide a demo access to developers
to get acquainted with system and architecture before they can try on VM or
Amazon AMI?

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ahousley
Thanks, Hassan!

We were originally a SaaS recommendation engine and will continue to provide a
fully-managed cloud-based solution. It’s now serving recommendations on
hundreds of millions of page views per month.

There are a few pretty significant technical tasks we need to complete to make
the API provisioning streamlined enough to support trial accounts since there
are some manual steps required to configure the metadata properly, etc.

Since we decided to go open-source last September, all of our R&D focus has
been in preparing this open-source release instead of the self-serve.
Streamlining our cloud service is in the roadmap, and it's now powered by the
same codebase as the open-source project.

The feedback we received from developers who tried the AMI and VM are that
it's super quick to get started. And as you can see we've spent a lot of time
recently on documentation.

If you're interested in the hosted API, please email support@seldon.io.

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72deluxe
Will this project cope with the appearance of The Mule?

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ptx
Perhaps if you run it on FoundationDB, it can fall back to a second
FoundationDB server in the event of a crisis.

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sandstrom
Looks interesting, seems like a neat product.

Some thoughts on how to make the webpage more informative:

\- Improve the schematic overview[1], e.g. what's the purpose of a logging
cluster? General logging? The MySQL database, what's it's role? My initial
reaction is that logging/sql-storage could be handled outside of Seldon. I may
be wrong, but you should help people here.

\- Same with load-balancers, seems like it should be outside the scope of a
prediction service. If not, an explanation would help.

\- Clarify which parts are open-source, and which ones are closed. E.g. with
ElasticSearch, it's obvious on their front-page which components are open-
source and which-ones are paid.

\- Add a comparison to prediction.io (RethinkDB's comparison with MongoDB[2]
is a good example). It's an obvious question people will have, answering it
upfront is helpful. Keep it fair/unbiased.

[1] [http://www.seldon.io/open-source/](http://www.seldon.io/open-source/) [2]
[http://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparison-
tables/](http://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparison-tables/)

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ahousley
Thanks - this is all useful feedback.

You're right about the load balancers - this doesn't form part of the project
codebase, but it's important for people to know that the API servers are
stateless and can scale horizontally. However, the other infrastructure
components are required as Seldon provides the full end-to-end platform not
just collection of predictive algorithms.

We will review your comments and for now we linked to the infrastructure page
in our docs:
[http://docs.seldon.io/tech.html](http://docs.seldon.io/tech.html)

We are planning to release some functionality under a separate commercial
license, just as anyone is free to do. Everything you currently see on the
website and Github repos is open-source and licensed under Apache 2.0.

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stats_lly
This seems interesting. Does it support user-defined algorithms? Or does it
have to be a combination of the exsiting algorithms that Seldon provides? I
don't seem to able to get a definite answer from this page:
[http://docs.seldon.io/configuration.html](http://docs.seldon.io/configuration.html)

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firemanphil
We are targeting to provide this in the next few weeks. Sign up for the
newsletter or follow the project and we'll notify you when it's available.

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firemanphil
Hi, I'm a developer on this project so I can answer any technical questions
you may have.

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malux85
Hey this looks sweet. I'm still new to this field, but I'm looking to do some
collaborative filtering across large datasets (4 billion rows+)

I was looking at using Prediction.IO and this looks suitable too, can you
elaborate on the high level differences between this project and
prediction.io?

I'm also curious about horizontal scaling.

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firemanphil
Presently most of our CF algorithms utilize Apache Spark but we intend to be
agnostic on this and allow any machine learning platform to be integrated. I
believe that Spark can easily handle this size of data set.

With regards to horizontal scaling, there are two parts to consider. Creating
the models and serving the recommendations (the Seldon server project).

Model creation is done in a variety of ways, but but can be managed with
scalable technologies such as Spark.

The Seldon Server project can be deployed on as many machines are you require
and they will work together to provide recommendations behind a load balancer.
We have experience working with some very large news websites so this part of
our technology is well developed.

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malux85
Great thanks for your feedback, I will setup an installation in my home lab
this weekend, super excited!

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bjpirt
Great name - nice Asimov reference

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radq
How does this compare to PredictionIO?

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ahousley
It looks like they have built an interesting platform, but to be honest we
haven't really paid attention to the details. We've been 100% focussed on our
own product, but here’s my reply to a similar question which covers some of
the unique benefits of Seldon:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9262971)

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bshimmin
I had no idea what this was, but found the main web site here:
[http://www.seldon.io/](http://www.seldon.io/) (It features a carousel which
updates faster than you can casually read the text, which I did not find
encouraging.)

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ahousley
Thanks for highlighting this issue, we've slowed down the carousel.

