Prerequisites

1. A Cortex cluster (installation instructions)

2. The Cortex CLI (installation instructions)

Deployment

Let's build and deploy a classifier using the famous iris data set! Below are a few samples of iris data:

Our goal is to build a web API that returns the type of iris given its measurements.

cortex.yaml

mkdir iris && cd iris && touch cortex.yaml

Cortex requires an cortex.yaml file which defines a deployment resource. Other resources may be defined in arbitrarily named YAML files in the the directory which contains cortex.yaml or any subdirectories. For this example, we will define all of our resources in cortex.yaml.

Add to cortex.yaml:

- kind: deployment
  name: iris

Configure data ingestion

Add to cortex.yaml:

# Environments
​
- kind: environment
  name: dev
  data:
    type: csv
    path: s3a://cortex-examples/iris.csv
    schema: [@sepal_length, @sepal_width, @petal_length, @petal_width, @class]

Cortex is able to read from any S3 bucket that you have access to.

Define the model

This configuration will generate a training dataset with the specified columns and train our classifier using the generated dataset. Here we're using a built-in estimator (which uses TensorFlow's DNNClassifier) but Cortex supports any TensorFlow code that adheres to the tf.estimator API.

Add to cortex.yaml:

# Models
​
- kind: model
  name: dnn
  estimator: cortex.dnn_classifier
  target_column: @class
  input:
    numeric_columns: [@sepal_length, @sepal_width, @petal_length, @petal_width]
    target_vocab: ['Iris-setosa', 'Iris-versicolor', 'Iris-virginica']
  hparams:
    hidden_units: [4, 2]
  training:
    batch_size: 10
    num_steps: 1000

Define web APIs

This will make the model available as a live web service that can serve real-time predictions.

Add to cortex.yaml:

# APIs
​
- kind: api
  name: iris-type
  model: @dnn

Deploy the pipeline

$ cortex deploy
​
Deployment started

You can get a summary of the status of resources using cortex get:

$ cortex get --watch

Test the API

Get the API's endpoint:

$ cortex get api iris-type

Use cURL to test the API:

$ curl -k \
     -X POST \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
     -d '{ "samples": [ { "sepal_length": 5.2, "sepal_width": 3.6, "petal_length": 1.4, "petal_width": 0.3 } ] }' \
     <API endpoint>

Cleanup

Delete the iris application:

$ cortex delete iris
​
Deployment deleted