Use models

Whether you need to download your models to use them, or you're looking to set up some automation in CI/CD to deploy them, Iterative Studio provides these capabilities.

Download models

If your model file is DVC-tracked, you can download any of its registered versions using dvc get.

Looking up right command in Studio

Model details page have a command ready to copy and use under "Get the model file":

Constructing the command manually

You can also construct this command manually using this template:

$ dvc get ${GIT_REPO} ${MODEL_PATH} --rev ${GIT_REV}

Let's download the model in the example-get-started-experiments is seg-model.

To find out the model file path (e.g. models/model.pkl) you can see the Model's details page or check dvc.yaml the model annotation was written to.

To find out the Git revision, you can check the list of Git tags or use GTO:

$ gto show seg-model@latest --ref
seg-model@v0.0.1#1

Putting everything together, to download the model file, you can use the following dvc command:

$ dvc get https://github.com/iterative/example-get-started-experiments \
    models/model.pkl \
    --rev seg-model@v0.0.1#1

Note that models/model.pkl is the path that was specified in dvc.yaml, and not the physical path of the model file (in the remote storage).

DVC will figure out the right file to download from the remote storage for you. Note that for running this command, you will need to have remote storage credentials set up in your environment.

Deploying and publishing models in CI/CD

A popular deployment option is to use CI/CD (triggered when Git tags are pushed) to publish new model version for consumers to use, or deploy it upon stage assignment.

Since GTO register versions and assign stages by creating Git tags, you can set up a CI/CD to be triggered once they're pushed to the repo. To see an actual example, check out the workflow in example-gto repo. The workflow uses the GTO GH Action that interprets the Git tag, finds out the model's version, stage assigned if any, and annotations details such as path, type, description or downloads the model binaries for you to use them in CI.

That example repo also introduces a workflow that deploys a model from CI/CD using MLEM.

Finally, you can find examples of building a Docker Image with a model and deploying it to the cloud in GTO User Guide.