Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver accurate forecasts. Amazon Forecast can use historical time series data (e.g., price, promotions, economic performance metrics) to create accurate forecasts for businesses.
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Amazon SageMaker
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Amazon SageMaker enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models at any scale. Amazon SageMaker removes all the barriers that typically slow down developers who want to use machine learning.
I personally get the feeling that Amazon Forecast must have been a direct product released on the models Amazon themselves must have used at some port. Amazon Forecast definitely shines when using it for product demand, inventory, and pricing throughout store locations, etc. Everything, including data-set importing, works best in this context. When applying it to more edge cases like resource planning around events, it can be a bit more tricky to apply effectively.
Amazon Sagemaker suits well in areas of data science and Machine learnings where medium to high-volume data is to be used for analysis. For a lean and platform agnostic deployment, it provides kubernetes integration to containerize the solution and deploy on any platform. It is one of the best solution for technical users for training Machine Learning models.
SageMaker is useful as a managed Jupyter notebook server. Using the notebook instances' IAM roles to grant access to private S3 buckets and other AWS resources is great. Using SageMaker's lifecycle scripts and AWS Secrets Manager to inject connection strings and other secrets is great.
SageMaker is good at serving models. The interface it provides is often clunky, but a managed, auto-scaling model server is powerful.
SageMaker is opinionated about versioning machine learning models and useful if you agree with its opinions.
There was no other product or service that was considered before making the choice to go with Amazon Forecast as the forecasting that the company was looking for had everything running in the AWS environment, the choice had to be obvious. Integrating with Amazon Forecast also ensured that everything is under a single roof and we didn't have to go multiple places looking for data when needed.
We have not invested in another machine learning software at this time and so far this has proved very successful with our machine learning teams. As mentioned, I am training these individuals simply on the fundamentals of the software and using it/customizing it for their needs. It has been very easy to do this and has gotten great reviews across the organization so far.