MLOps with Microservices: A Case Study on the Maritime Domain

Abstract: This case study describes challenges and lessons learned on building Ocean Guard: a Machine Learning-Enabled System (MLES) for anomaly detection in the maritime domain. First, the paper presents the system's specification, and architecture. Ocean Guard was designed with a microservices' architecture to enable multiple teams to work on the project in parallel. Then, the paper discusses how the developers adapted contract-based design to MLOps for achieving that goal. As a MLES, Ocean Guard employs code, model, and data contracts to establish guidelines between its services. This case study hopes to inspire software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists to leverage similar approaches for their systems.