Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks Unified Analytics Platform

• SageMaker is useful as a managed Jupyter notebook server. Using the notebook instances' IAM roles to grant access to private S3 buckets and other AWS resources is great. Using SageMaker's lifecycle scripts and AWS Secrets Manager to inject connection strings and other secrets is great.
• SageMaker is good at serving models. The interface it provides is often clunky, but a managed, auto-scaling model server is powerful.
• SageMaker is opinionated about versioning machine learning models and useful if you agree with its opinions.

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• Extremely Flexible in Data Scenarios
• Fantastic Performance
• DB is always updating the system so we can have latest features.

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• SageMaker does not allow you to schedule training jobs.
• SageMaker does not provide a mechanism for easily tracking metrics logged during training.
• We often fit feature extraction and model pipelines. We can inject the model artifacts into AWS-provided containers, but we cannot inject the feature extractors. We could provide our own container to SageMaker instead, but this is tantamount to serving the model ourselves.

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• Visualization - Great area of improvement
• Integration with Git
• COST

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• We have been able to deliver data products more rapidly because we spend less time building data pipelines and model servers.
• We can prototype more rapidly because it is easy to configure notebooks to access AWS resources.
• For our use-cases, serving models is less expensive with SageMaker than bespoke servers.

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• The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
• DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
• The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.

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