Metaflow Tags: Tags in CI/CD

Key Takeaways

let's turn into more production oriented use cases for tagging so now imagine that you're a data scientist who has been iterating on a workflow locally let's say we execute this workflow we keep making changes um whatever it might be and and at some point like we are pretty confident that the workflow does what we wanted it to do so uh of course it is it is definitely considered a good practice that you used git for version control and not only that but maybe you have some kind of a ci cd setup you used to create pull request and so forth so we can do the usual thing that we do when developing software so let's say that we have been working on on some feature brands so this is new awesome model branch and now we are really happy with our results um so we uh of course like first add our changes there and like we commit uh add new awesome model right like this right and um now we push our branch to github and um as usual what we want to do here by the way i can show you that we have all these past executions that have been run locally first but now when we go to github we are ready to create a pull request and we can say that okay we are adding new awesome model here we create the pull request and what i did here is that i we have also uh github actions set up and what the github actions do i can show you here is that they first execute the workflow here they execute a test run like making sure that the flow executes correctly of course this is your opportunity to set up any kind of a test you want to have in place oftentimes we have unit tests in place the test individual modules um that are that are like kind of the part of your workflow maybe you have an end to end integration test like for the whole workflow like what we are doing here but the key part here is that like after the test is successful we will tag the or the github actions will tag the the successful run so you are able to see uh like when when the kind of the the ci cd tests have passed successfully and then you can take further action based on that information for instance you could deploy the model automatically you could deploy the workflow automatically whenever that happens so now we can see that the tests executed successfully and after the test executed successfully we have an action to tag the corresponding executions so now if we go back to the to the meta flow ui here we see that there is a one more execution of the same workflow but in this case like we know that it was executed by github actions we just tag it accordingly and then like we have the tag mentioning that okay so we know that the tests were okay and now this is quite convenient because now in this case like you see all your local executions and then the github executions mixed up but i mean for instance you could imagine like having this view like where you only see like all the all the successful uh cicd execution so you can keep track of all the pushes all the model versions that uh resulted due to kind of a positive tests like successful tests being executed by github actions