Projects in RapidMiner are great! A project is the place for collaboration around a data science endeavor where the end goal is to create some value to the enterprise.
To truly realize value of such a project, one needs to integrate its results into the daily life of the enterprise. That's where deployments come into the picture!
One size does not fit all
Depending on what your workflows do and what your business requirements are in your project, you might need different types of deployments.
If you need to visualize things on a convenient dashboard, check out our apps.
If you would like to serve a model prediction or an ETL task as a building block that is used programmatically by other business applications, you should create a REST API deployment.
Predictive models need retraining as conditions change, which you might want to do either on a schedule, or triggered externally based on something in your organization's business processes. You might also want to create a monthly report, or load and process a week's worth of data in a single batch.
These are just some examples on how project outcomes may integrate into the daily lives of businesses. We at RapidMiner feel that it's important we provide all these various tools for our users to maximize the value they bring with our platform to their enterprise.
REST API deployments
The most recent advancement in this area is the release of REST API deployments, which allows you to expose a RapidMiner workflow as a REST API endpoint.
This endpoint is self-contained, both in terms of security and resource allocation, and is able to serve a large number of requests with relatively low latency. Keep in mind that this latency heavily depends on what the deployed workflow does.
We appreciate that integrating such a component into a business process might take long in larger enterprises due to IT security compliance processes and other factors. We also appreciate that deployments need to change over time and that healthy innovation requires several iterations and a constant need to improve. That's why we have made it possible to easily replace REST API deployments while keeping their external interface (address, security) intact.
More info on how to use REST API deployments can be found onthe deployments documentation page.
Next steps
As mentioned above, we strive for a complete toolbox to deploy projects, so we are committed to continuously expanding this feature set within RapidMiner. As a next step, we are working on a type of deployment which will provide external triggers to run a workflow. This will be most useful to either execute long-running things on an ad-hoc basis (such as generating a report), or to integrate RapidMiner workflows with an external orchestration platform.
Scheduled workflow execution will shortly follow as well.
You can read more about deployments, their features and how to create them onthe deployments documentation page. Please reach out toproduct@www.turtlecreekpls.comwith any questions or improvement ideas related to this feature, we'd love to hear your thoughts!