🆕 Python driven configuration for models

In addition to our normal YAML configuration, we support configuring your model using pure Python. This offers the following benefits:

• Typed configuration via Python code with IDE autocomplete, instead of a separate yaml configuration file
• Simpler directory structure that IDEs support for module resolution

In this guide, we go through deploying a simple Model using this new framework.

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Step 1: Initializing your project

We leverage traditional truss init functionality with a new flag to create the directory structure:

truss init my-new-model --python-config

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Step 2: Write your model

To build a model with this new framework, we require two things:

• A class that inherits from baseten.ModelBase, which will serve as the entrypoint when invoking /predict
• A predict method with type hints

That’s it! The following is a contrived example of a complete model that will keep a running total of user provided input:

import truss_chains as baseten


class RunningTotalCalculator(baseten.ModelBase):
    def __init__(self):
        self._running_total = 0

    async def predict(self, increment: int) -> int:
        self._running_total += increment
        return self._running_total

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Step 3: Deploy, patch, and public your model

In order to deploy the first version of your new model, you can run:

truss push my_model.py

Please note that push (as well as all other commands below) will require that you pass the path to the file containing the model as the final argument.

This new workflow also supports patching, so you can quickly iterate during development without building new images every time.

truss watch my_model.py

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Model Configuration

Models can configure requirements for compute hardware (CPU count, GPU type and count, etc) and software dependencies (Python libraries or system packages) via the remote_config class variable within the model:

class RunningTotalCalculator(baseten.ModelBase):
    remote_config: baseten.RemoteConfig = baseten.RemoteConfig(
        compute=baseten.Compute(cpu_count=4, memory="1Gi", gpu="T4", gpu_count=2)
    )

    ...

See the remote configuration reference for a complete list of options.

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Context (access information)

You can add DeploymentContext object as an optional final argument to the __init__-method of a Model. This allows you to use secrets within your Model, but note that they’ll also need to be added to the assets.

We only expose secrets to the model that were explicitly requested in assets to comply with best security practices.

class RunningTotalCalculator(baseten.ModelBase):
    remote_config: baseten.RemoteConfig = baseten.RemoteConfig(
        ...
        assets=baseten.Assets(secret_keys=["token"])
    )

    def __init__(self, context: baseten.DeploymentContext = baseten.depends_context()):
        ...
        self._token = context.secrets["token"]

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Packages

If you want to include modules in your model, you can easily create them from the root of the project:

my-new-model/
    module_1/
	    submodule/
		    script.py
    module_2/
	    another_script.py
    my_model.py

With this file structure, you would import in my_model.py as follows:

import truss_chains as baseten

from module_1.submodule import script
from module_2 import another_script

class RunningTotalCalculator(baseten.ModelBase):
    ....

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Known Limitations

• RemoteConfig does not support all the options exposed by the traditional config.yaml. If you’re excited about this new development experience but need a specific feature ported over, please reach out to us!
• This new framework does not support preprocess or postprocess hooks. We typically recommend inlining functionality from those functions if easy, or utilizing chains if the needs are more complex.