I’m working on a video series and an ebook about Amazon Machine Learning, or AML.
AML is a great way to get started with machine learning, since you can focus on the key concepts of building and using a model and not worry about any infrastructure. AWS takes care of provisioning all the underlying IT infrastructure–you just worry about getting your data to S3, choosing how to build the model, and then using the model. Which, trust me, is quite enough to tackle if you are a machine learning newbie.
You can use the model to get predictions either in real time (with a default soft limit of 200 requests per second) or via batch processing, where you can upload up to 1TB of predictions to S3. Like everything in AWS, you can control the entire process via a well documented API or from various SDKs.
AML isn’t a fit for all machine learning needs–it processes text that is in CSV format and supports only supervised learning. There are other options on AWS (and other places as well).
The book is currently in progress, and I’ll be starting on the video soon.If you’d like to follow along as the book gets written, you can at leanpub: Amazon Machine Learning: An Introduction.