The first step of preparing a machine learning project in Azure is to prepare your Azure Machine Learning workspace, which provides all the tools, components, triggers, and actions you need to develop, train, deploy, and monitor your machine learning model. In this article of this series, I will talk about workspaces, Azure Machine Learning workspace, how to prepare a machine learning workspace, components you get within an ML workspace, and security, monitoring, and cost management features of a workspace.
What is a Workspace?
In Azure workspace, we get all the components of a project where multiple people can collaborate using different technical tools available within the workspace. It is a recommended best practice to create one workspace per project to monitor the cost, security, and accessibility better. We can have multiple projects in a single workspace and multiple people working on a single workspace as well, but it is easier to manage all the resources of a single workspace if they all belong to one project.
Machine Learning Workspace
In an Azure Machine Learning workspace, multiple data scientists, analysts, and collaborators work on a single machine learning project from a single place. Azure Machine Learning workspace provides several types of compute support, machine learning experiment management options, jobs pipeline, dataset management, data source connections, secured container handling, model environment preparation, and scalable inferencing options. To begin, we’ll need an Azure account, an Azure subscription, and a resource group to create a workspace. We can either create a new resource group or an existing one for our workspace.
We can create a machine learning workspace in Azure in multiple ways.
- Using Azure web portal
- Using Azure Machine Learning studio
- Using Azure Machine Learning Python SDK
- Using Azure CLI extension on the command line
- Using VS Code extension for Azure Machine Learning
In this article, we will look at the Azure web portal option to create our workspace.
Creating an Azure Machine Learning Workspace
To create an Azure Machine Learning workspace from the web portal, first, we need to click Create a resource. In the search box, look for Azure machine learning, and you will see all the available options under the search bar.