Google today announced the beta launch of Cloud AI Platform Pipelines, a service designed to deploy robust, repeatable AI pipelines along with monitoring, auditing, version tracking, and reproducibility in the cloud. Google’s pitching it as a way to deliver an “easy to install” secure execution environment for machine learning workflows, which could reduce the amount of time enterprises spend bringing products to production.

“When you’re just prototyping a machine learning model in a notebook, it can seem fairly straightforward. But when you need to start paying attention to the other pieces required to make a [machine learning] workflow sustainable and scalable, things become more complex,” wrote Google product manager Anusha Ramesh and staff developer advocate Amy Unruh in a blog post. “A machine learning workflow can involve many steps with dependencies on each other, from data preparation and analysis, to training, to evaluation, to deployment, and more. It’s hard to compose and track these processes in an ad-hoc manner — for example, in a set of notebooks or scripts — and things like auditing and reproducibility become increasingly problematic.”