Organizing ML Monorepo With Pants

The blog post by Michał Oleszak explores the advantages and complexities of using monorepos for machine learning (ML) projects, highlighting their adoption by major tech companies like Google, Meta, and Twitter. A monorepo, or monolithic repository, consolidates code for multiple projects into a single repository, offering benefits such as streamlined CI/CD processes, atomic commits, and consistent coding standards. However, it also presents challenges in scalability and complexity, particularly concerning dependencies and access control. The post emphasizes that, despite these challenges, monorepos can be particularly beneficial for ML projects due to their ability to integrate data pipelines, ensure consistency across experiments, simplify model versioning, and facilitate cross-functional collaboration. The author also introduces the Pants build system as a tool to effectively manage ML monorepos, detailing its setup, configuration, and usage for tasks such as code formatting, testing, and deploying ML models in Docker containers. The article concludes by endorsing Pants for its ease of use, supportive community, and ability to streamline various aspects of ML project management.