The best MLOps events and conferences for 2022

Author(s): Ed Shee

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DevOps

2021 was, quite rightly, touted as “The Year of MLOps”. The MLOps scene exploded with thousands of companies adopting practices and tools aimed at helping them get models into production faster and more efficiently. A multitude of new vendors, consultancies and open source tooling entered the field making it more important than ever to stay on top of what’s happening.

Throughout January I’ve been asking around to find out the best MLOps events people attended last year. There were loads of great suggestions to go through but a handful kept coming up over and over again. I’ve combined those with my own experiences to create a list of the events and conferences you definitely don’t want to miss:

AIIA

AIIA (The AI Infrastructure Alliance) is a non-profit foundation with the goal of bringing together the best individual MLOps tools to build “canonical stacks”. In 2022, AIIA is going to be running a series of events covering different aspects of the MLOps life cycle. The talks will be highly interactive, mostly comprised of technical demonstrations rather than endless slideware

The schedule for their first 4 events looks like this:

March 3rd — Experiment Tracking
April 7th — Model Deployment
May 5th — Monitoring and Tracking Models
June 2nd — Orchestration and Pipelines for Machine Learning

Events are virtual and will be published soon on the AIIA site.

MLOps Summit

This was one of the few conferences in 2021 that were totally dedicated to the theme of MLOps. The summit did a great job of gathering speakers from end-user companies like Chick-fil-A, Capital One, and BBC which meant for some really interesting war stories.

The 2022 edition runs 23rd — 24th June in San Francisco (and hopefully online too)

KubeCon

You can’t have MLOps without the Ops and it’s no secret that a huge chunk of the Ops (and DevOps) world have adopted Kubernetes as their deployment platform of choice. Kubecon has grown large enough to have its own “machine learning and data” track which will be packed full of MLOps content. Kubernetes users and open-source fans can’t afford to miss this one.

Kubecon EU takes place in Valencia, Spain on 16th — 20th May (also Virtual)

Kubecon NA will be in Detroit, Michigan on 24th — 28th October

MLOps Salon

The team over at Verta.ai put together a couple of micro-conferences (is that a thing?) focused on MLOps last year. I’m usually pretty skeptical of events run by vendors because, more often than not, they are full of product pitches. Excitingly, that wasn’t the case with these. Their applying MLOps at scale event had some brilliant external speakers who were really knowledgeable.

I can’t find any info on a 2022 schedule for these events but I’m hoping they’ll do more of them for sure!

MLOps Community

If you’re not already a member of the MLOps.community then go and join it right now! Throughout 2021 they ran regular meetups, reading groups, coffee sessions, and podcasts. The speakers are a nice mix of vendors, end-users, and open source contributors. The slack channels are also an awesome place to ask for help or advice.

Expect more of the same excellent content in 2022

ODSC

In the past, ODSC (Open Data Science Conference) might have focussed on traditional data science and included some machine learning content but these days it’s more likely the other way around. With ODSC being so big and having so much ML content, the last couple of years has seen more and more MLOps content being included. The trend is bound to stay the same and we’ll see even more great MLOps talks at the ODSC conferences this year.

ODSC East is in Boston on 19th — 21st April

ODSC West is in San Francisco on 1st — 3rd November

ODSC Europe is in London on 15th — 16th June

ODSC APAC is planned for 7th — 8th September and is currently fully virtual

MLOps World

As I mentioned earlier, there are only a handful of full-blown conferences that are totally dedicated to MLOps… MLOps World is one of them! The event in 2021 was packed full of interesting talks and I fully expect it’ll be even bigger and better in 2022.

The 2022 conference takes place in Toronto, Canada on 7th — 10th June

apply()

This conference kept coming up over and over again when I was collecting opinions for this list. Apply() conf has been put together by the team over at Tecton. ML Engineering is the main focus of the conference so anyone who works in the MLOps space is bound to learn something new.

Apply() is back in May 2022 (18th-19th) and is virtual

MLOps London

I can’t make a list of the best events for 2022 and not include my own? That’d just be rude, right? Jokes and nepotism aside, I genuinely believe the MLOps London meetups belong on this list.

I’ve taken care to make sure all of these meetups not only have great quality MLOps speakers but also are streamed live online so that people all over the world can attend.

MLOps London takes place every two months. You can attend in person in London or follow the youtube channel to watch them live or on-demand.

If I’ve missed an event you loved from last year, let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for places to learn!

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The best MLOps events and conferences for 2022 was originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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