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Amazon SageMaker Now Supports Additional Instance Types, Local Mode, Open Sourced Containers, MXNet and Tensorflow Updates

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Amazon SageMaker continues to iterate quickly and release new features on behalf of customers. Starting today, SageMaker adds support for many new instance types, local testing with the SDK, and Apache MXNet 1.1.0 and Tensorflow 1.6.0. Let’s take a quick look at each of these updates.

New Instance Types

Amazon SageMaker customers now have additional options for right-sizing their workloads for notebooks, training, and hosting. Notebook instances now support almost all T2, M4, P2, and P3 instance types with the exception of t2.micro, t2.small, and m4.large instances. Model training now supports nearly all M4, M5, C4, C5, P2, and P3 instances with the exception of m4.large, c4.large, and c5.large instances. Finally, model hosting now supports nearly all T2, M4, M5, C4, C5, P2, and P3 instances with the exception of m4.large instances. Many customers can take advantage of the newest P3, C5, and M5 instances to get the best price/performance for their workloads. Customers also take advantage of the burstable compute model on T2 instances for endpoints or notebooks that are used less frequently.

Open Sourced Containers, Local Mode, and TensorFlow 1.6.0 and MXNet 1.1.0

Today Amazon SageMaker has open sourced the MXNet and Tensorflow deep learning containers that power the MXNet and Tensorflow estimators in the SageMaker SDK. The ability to write Python scripts that conform to simple interface is still one of my favorite SageMaker features and now those containers can be additionally customized to include any additional libraries. You can download these containers locally to iterate and experiment which can accelerate your debugging cycle. When you’re ready go from local testing to production training and hosting you just change one line of code.

These containers launch with support for Tensorflow 1.6.0 and MXNet 1.1.0 as well. Tensorflow has a number of new 1.6.0 features including support for CUDA 9.0, cuDNN 7, and AVX instructions which allows for significant speedups in many training applications. MXNet 1.1.0 adds a number of new features including a Text API mxnet.text with support for text processing, indexing, glossaries, and more. Two of the really cool pre-trained embeddings included are GloVe and fastText.

Available Now
All of the features mentioned above are available today. As always please let us know on Twitter or in the comments below if you have any questions or if you’re building something interesting. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go experiment with some of those new MXNet APIs!

Randall

Modified 08/19/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Randall Hunt

Randall Hunt

Senior Software Engineer and Technical Evangelist at AWS. Formerly of NASA, SpaceX, and MongoDB.