A Multivocal Review of MLOps Practices, Challenges and Open Issues

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of MLOps, synthesizing diverse practices, challenges, and open issues from a wide range of literature to offer a unified understanding of the field.

Contribution

It introduces a multivocal review methodology to integrate peer-reviewed and grey literature, creating a holistic framework for MLOps practices and challenges.

Findings

Identifies key MLOps practices and tools.

Highlights common challenges in MLOps adoption.

Proposes a unified conceptual framework for MLOps.

Abstract

MLOps has emerged as a key solution to address many socio-technical challenges of bringing ML models to production, such as integrating ML models with non-ML software, continuous monitoring, maintenance, and retraining of deployed models. Despite the utility of MLOps, an integrated body of knowledge regarding MLOps remains elusive because of its extensive scope due to the diversity of ML productionalization challenges it addresses. Whilst the existing literature reviews provide valuable snapshots of specific practices, tools, and research prototypes related to MLOps at various times, they focus on particular facets of MLOps, thus fail to offer a comprehensive and invariant framework that can weave these perspectives into a unified understanding of MLOps. This paper presents a Multivocal Literature Review that systematically analyzes a corpus of 150 peer-reviewed and 48 grey literature to synthesize a unified conceptualization of MLOps and develop a snapshot of its best practices, adoption challenges, and solutions.