It was a long summer break since our last newsletter in June and a lot has happened. As we were focusing on new integrations and features in the last couple of months we now used the time to put ZenML in a bigger context. What and how will ZenML ultimately be used for? Who will be our user or even our customer? What will be the final product that people will pay for? Many ground-breaking discussions led us to great new developments within the company. Let me share them with you today!

⛅Launching the ZenServer with Dashboard

ZenML: Special Launch of ZenServer and Dashboard

ZenML is moving from many decentralized solutions to a centralized service, the “ZenServer”. We saw the need within our community to significantly change ZenML’s backbone and bring everything that we built with our contributors together in one smooth and easy-to-use solution. We are also introducing our first Web UI as a dashboard to access stacks, pipeline runs, and artifacts across projects. Both, the ZenServer and the UI will still be open-source and can be deployed locally and remotely. This will enable a whole new universe of collaboration and interaction among ML teams. We imagine this to be the ultimate path towards a real product with scalable business usage.

Join our launch event on October 5th and register here!

🗓️“Month of MLOps” Competition

Right after the launch event, we will be hosting a month-long competition to get our new ZenServer into many people’s hands. The participants will pick an ML problem of their choice and bring it into a production-ready stack within 4 weeks - regardless of their skills!

So far we have more than 140 registrations with teams from 1-5. (Also, many well-known tech and ML companies signed up!) Besides fame, they can win cash prizes of up to 750 USD and get selected by the amazing jury of external judges Chip Huyen, Anthony Goldbloom, Charles Frye, and Goku Mohandas. We’re really looking forward!

Get more information or still register here.

⛵Team Event Summer Sailing!

The ZenTeam went out on a sailing boat together. We met at Ammersee close to Munich and just enjoyed one day on the water. It was also the perfect kick-off for Rosie, our new Chief of Staff!

Since our last newsletter, we also had three amazing more remote joiners to the ZenTeam!

Dickson, Developer Advocate
Jayesh, Jr. Platform Engineer (now full-time)
Safoine, Jr. MLOps engineer (now full-time)

A very warm welcome to all of you guys and let’s also get you on this sailing boat soon! Now, let the pictures talk 🤩

🎙️Podcasts and Other Content

We've released quite a few podcast episodes since the last time you read this newsletter. It's hard to pick favorites from among those, but here are four we really think you'll enjoy:

Building MLOps Tools with Outerbounds — we met the Metaflow team!
Educating the next generation with Goku Mohandas - The initiator of madewithML.com and judge in our first “Month of MLOps”!
ML Engineering with Ben Wilson — a bunch of wisdom packed into an hour of conversation from friend-of-ZenML at MLFlow.
Humans in the Loop with Iva Gumnishka — pairs well with the new ZenML annotation stack component

We've also been busy generating guides, tutorials, and other content around MLOps and the work we're doing on the engineering side. Some of the highlights include:

Using annotation tools in MLOps and our open-source list of tooling
Integrating with three orchestrators: Github Actions + Vertex AI + Kubernetes
Data validation with Great Expectations and validation using Deepchecks
Deployment with KServe

🍻That’s a wrap! Next time I’m more than happy to talk about how the launch of the ZenServer and the “Month of MLOps” went and what we’ve learned. We’re trying to send a newsletter out soon again but In the meanwhile, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn for “quick content”.

All the best and have a nice weekend,
Adam

Building an Open-Source Startup in Public.

⛵ZenML is setting the sails