Caffe Deep Learning Framework vs. Databricks Data Intelligence Platform

Caffe is only appropriate for some new beginners who don't want to write any lines of code, just want to use existing models for image recognition, or have some taste of the so-called Deep Learning.

Incentivized

Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.

Incentivized

• Caffe is good for traditional image-based CNN as this was its original purpose.

Incentivized

• Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
• Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
• Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
• Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers

Incentivized

• Caffe's model definition - static configuration files are really painful. Maintaining big configuration files with so many parameters and details of many layers can be a really challenging task.
• Besides imagine and vision (CNN), Caffe also gradually adds some other NN architecture support. It doesn't play well in a recurrent domain, so we have to say variety is a problem.
• Caffe's deployment for production is not easy. The community support and project development all mean it is almost fading out of the market.
• The learning curve is quite steep. Although TensorFlow's is not easy to master either, the reward for Caffe is much less than the TensorFlow can offer.

Incentivized

• Sometimes, when multiple jobs depend on each other in different environments, it is not always easy to see the full workflow in one place.
• It is sometimes difficult to determine which job or cluster contributes more to the overall cost.
• For beginners, cluster configuration may be a little difficult. So more recommendation in the platform can help.

Incentivized

Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX

Incentivized

One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.

TensorFlow is kind of low-level API most suited for those developers who like to control the details, while Keras provides some kind of high-level API for those users who want to boost their project or experiment by reusing most of the existing architecture or models and the accumulated best practice. However, Caffe isn't like either of them so the position for the user is kind of embarrassing.

Incentivized

The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.

Incentivized

• Since we stopped using Caffe before it can reach the production phase, there is no clear ROI that can be defined.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized