Welcome to Open Source Stories. In this blog series, we showcase the remarkable journeys of our open source (OS) users who embody the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and community. Join us as we dive in to the stories of the individuals who have found inspiration in the open source world, are currently leveraging open source technologies, and have great aspirations for the future of the open source community. Today, let’s meet Tel Aviv entrepreneur and data & ML engineer, Yinon D. Nahamu.

The principles of open source

Before leaving to pursue entrepreneurship, Yinon worked as a Senior Data Engineer for a leading tech consultancy in Tel Aviv, Tikal, whose fundamental values were based on open source software. Their desire to share valuable knowledge and quality content with the tech community let to their open-source approach. They realized that it’s challenging to base an entire product on closed source because you become dependent on it. Open source is also commonly used in startups for a variety of other reasons; like that it’s free and accessible to all, and it gives the user more control and flexibility.

Open source software has many fundamental values that align with Seldon. One of its core principles is transparency. OS promotes the availability of source code to all users which enables them to inspect, modify, and redistribute it. Collaboration also plays a crucial role, fostering a global community of contributors who work together to enhance the software through shared knowledge and collective problem-solving.

Why Seldon Core?

Yinon used Seldon Core with one of his agency clients. Seldon Core helped him create large-scale online inference infrastructure with Kubernetes for his client. The use case that he was using it for was mainly for model deployment as well as natural language processing.

There are several reasons why Yinon chose to use Seldon Core to deploy inference in production over all the other open source options, but here were his top priorities:

• Start for free
• To avoid getting locked to a specific cloud vendor
• Enabled self services for CI/CD
• The comprehensive tutorials and “how to” documentation
• End to end platform capabilities: others didn’t have all the solutions
• More control
• Better workflow
• Much faster than depending on team resources to be up to speed

Of course, with any open source software, there’s going to be challenges along the way. One of the biggest challenges Yinon had with Seldon Core was that it requires Kubernetes, a portable extensible OS platform.

He wants to thank Seldon for giving him a reason to learn Kubernetes. Now Kubernetes is used in several open source products so it is a skill that he will continue to use with his OS projects.

Starting with Seldon Core

Yinon’s advice for getting started with Seldon Core is to take full advantage of the documentation that we provide for valuable insights and information on the platform’s functionalities, features, and usage.

The Slack community is also a key resource that Yinon advocates for. In the Slack community, you can network with people in the MLOps industry who truly have a passion for machine learning and are generously giving others feedback and advice on their ML systems. Ask a question in the channel and it will usually quickly get answered by someone in the community.

Another way to get started, and the way that I actually discovered Yinon, is to follow Yinon’s MLOps tutorial on Youtube titled, How to Deploy ML Models to Production with Seldon Core. The tutorial comes with a repo, explanation of how to use a Kubernetes cluster, and how to build your own infrastructure.

The Future of Open Source

Yinon’s enthusiasm for the OS community stems from its ability to foster collaboration on a global scale. He has been contributing to open source for a while and plans to continue his collaboration in his free time as well as with future clients.

Professionally, Yinon is building his entrepreneurial career and has pivoted to focus on creating his own software as a service. He actively is looking to get out of his comfort zone and build something great. We look forward to seeing what he creates next!