
Capstone Project: End-to-End Predictive Maintenance
Design a full ML system for a manufacturing plant. Ingest sensor data, train a forecasting model, deploy via CI/CD, and monitor for drift.
55 articles

Design a full ML system for a manufacturing plant. Ingest sensor data, train a forecasting model, deploy via CI/CD, and monitor for drift.

A high-level review of the key concepts for each domain of the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer exam.

How to deconstruct the exam questions. A guide to the most common question patterns and how to interpret the scenarios.

How to make the most of your time on the exam. A guide to time management and exam tactics.

A checklist of the key concepts and topics to review before you take the exam.

VPC-SC, CMEK, Private Endpoints, and Custom Service Accounts. How to secure your ML infrastructure for the enterprise.

How to build and maintain a robust and reliable ML system. A guide to the key principles of MLOps.

How to design and build scalable ML systems on Google Cloud. A guide to the most common infrastructure patterns.

How to establish metrics and baseline monitoring for your ML models using Vertex AI Model Monitoring.

How to detect and prevent training-serving skew. A guide to using TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) to compare your training and serving data.

How to monitor your model's performance over time and detect feature drift. A guide to using Vertex AI Model Monitoring.

How to troubleshoot common errors in training and serving. A guide to debugging your ML models.

How to build AI systems that are safe, fair, and transparent. A guide to responsible AI practices.

How to ensure that your model is ready for production and that it meets all your ethical requirements.

How to use Vertex Explainable AI to understand your model's predictions. A guide to the different feature attribution methods available on Vertex AI.

How to track and compare datasets and model artifacts using Vertex AI ML Metadata.

How to establish metadata tracking and lineage for your ML workflows using Vertex AI ML Metadata.

How to manage versions of your datasets, models, and other ML assets using the Vertex AI Model Registry and other tools.

When to retrain your model. A guide to defining retraining policies based on schedule, performance decay, and new data.

How to automate your ML workflows using Cloud Build. A guide to integrating your ML pipelines with CI/CD tools.

How to safely and automatically deploy your models to production. A guide to continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) for ML models.

The heart of MLOps. Learn how to design ML pipeline architectures using Kubeflow Pipelines (KFP), TensorFlow Extended (TFX), and Cloud Composer.

How to ensure data quality and model performance across training and serving. A guide to TensorFlow Data Validation (TFDV) and TensorFlow Model Analysis (TFMA).

How to break down your ML workflow into components and how to trigger your pipeline to run automatically.

How to survive Black Friday. Learn about Autoscaling, GPU Inference, TF-TRT, and optimizing latency for high-throughput serving.

Choosing the right hardware for serving. When to use CPUs vs GPUs for online prediction.

How to use the Vertex AI Feature Store for low-latency feature lookups at serving time.

How to make your model faster. A guide to performance tuning and latency optimization for online prediction.

How to safely deploy new models to production. A guide to A/B testing and model staging using Vertex AI Prediction.

The Architecture Decision. When to use HTTP prediction vs batch jobs, and how to handle cost/latency trade-offs.

Batch vs. Online Prediction. How to deploy models to endpoints, manage versions, and optimize for latency.

Managing the lifecycle. Aliasing, Tagging, and Rollback strategies using Vertex AI Model Registry.

Choosing the right silicon. When to pay for A100s, when to use TPUs, and how to quantize models for mobile deployment.

How GPUs talk to each other. Understanding Ring All-Reduce, PS Strategy, and when to use NCCL.

How to feed the beast. GCS Bucket structure, Managed Datasets, and improving I/O performance.

How to break the memory limit. Learn about Data Parallelism, Model Parallelism, reduction servers, and how to use Vertex AI Custom Training jobs.

Stop guessing. Learn to use Vertex AI Vizier for Bayesian Optimization, and how to define your search space for efficient tuning.

Why did my job fail? Debugging OOM errors, NaN losses, and 'Permission Denied'.

CNNs, RNNs, Transformers, or XGBoost? Learn how to map business problems to model architectures, and how to define success metrics.

Understanding Feature Attributions, Integrated Gradients, and XRAI. How to satisfy regulatory constraints on 'Black Box' models.

The new exam domain. When to use Model Garden, Vertex AI Agent Builder, and how to tune Foundation Models.

Why use Vertex AI Workbench? We cover Managed Notebooks vs User-Managed Notebooks, and how to choose the right one for your security and compute needs.

Choosing the right hardware for development. When to use a local GPU vs a remote cluster, and how to define custom containers.

Notebooks are notoriously hard to version control. Learn patterns for nbdime, saving outputs, and refactoring to Python scripts.

From messy notebooks to organized experiments. Learn how to use Vertex AI Experiments to log parameters and metrics, and how Kubeflow Pipelines can automate your experimentation process.

Data is 80% of ML. Learn how to execute ETL pipelines using BigQuery and Dataflow, and how to manage features using Vertex AI Feature Store.

Dataflow is the engine, but what logic goes inside? Learn the difference between Instance-Level vs Full-Pass transformations and how to use TensorFlow Transform (TFT) to prevent skew.

Stop duplicating feature engineering code. Learn how Feature Store unifies Online (Serving) and Offline (Training) feature access.

How to train custom models without writing training loops. We cover AutoML for Vision, Tables, and Text, and how to prepare your data for success.

Your AutoML model is trained. Is it good? interpreting Confusion Matrices, Precision/Recall curves, and Feature Importance to fix underperforming models.

When to skip training altogether. A guide to the Vision, Natural Language, Translation, and Speech APIs. Learn the 'Pre-trained' strategic advantage.

Why move data when you can bring the model to the data? Learn to build Classification, Regression, and Time-Series models directly within BigQuery using standard SQL.

How to preprocess data using SQL. Learn to use the TRANSFORM clause, ML.Bucketing, ML.Scaling, and One-Hot Encoding directly in BigQuery.

How to get answers. Using ML.PREDICT, ML.EXPLAIN_PREDICT, and exporting BQML models to Vertex AI for online serving.

Your roadmap to passing the Google Cloud Professional ML Engineer certification. We break down the exam structure, the case study format, and the mindset shift from 'Data Scientist' to 'ML Engineer'.