Hi! I'm Naren, the other co-founder of FloydHub. I'll be happy to answer any questions and really appreciate any feedback you can provide. Thanks!
Curious about the name - why Floyd?
Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
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Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#72Hi! I'm Naren, the other co-founder of FloydHub. I'll be happy to answer any questions and really appreciate any feedback you can provide. Thanks!
Curious about the name - why Floyd?
When we started out, we were just building a bot (droid) to manage our deep learning workflows (scheduling jobs, logging results, etc.)
So, Flow + Droid => Floyd. Also, a hat tip to one of my favorite bands :)
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#73I’m a Data Scientist and I work in a large-ish corp. We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of all of our infrastructure needs - we mostly focus only on data science. I would expect most medium and large enterprises to have the same setup. Why would they use FloydHub?
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#74I’m a Data Scientist and I work in a large-ish corp. We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of all of our infrastructure needs - we mostly focus only on data science. I would expect most medium and large enterprises to have the same setup. Why would they use FloydHub?
I think you said it yourself, "We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of this". I assume the goal of Floyd is to eliminate the need to build such teams and reduce cost of this type of effort. This indeed seems to be the goal of most SaaS/PaaS startups.
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#75I’m a Data Scientist and I work in a large-ish corp. We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of all of our infrastructure needs - we mostly focus only on data science. I would expect most medium and large enterprises to have the same setup. Why would they use FloydHub?
I sense that you are not currently their target market the way that Heroku was not originally intended for the enterprise but have since expanded to it. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.
My first time deploying to Heroku in the summer of 2011 was a magical moment after spending a rather frustrating day futzing with a bunch of more barebones providers like Linode, AWS, Engine Yard, and few others I can't even remember at this point. I cannot stress how magical it was -- I like to think I'm a competent enough developer but I wasted a long time gluing things together and never quite getting it right for some reason. Before calling it quits for the day I decided to try that Heroku thing I had been reading and within 20 minutes I was up and running. That was impressive.
To note, I've been a happy paying customer of theirs since then, so they've made a decent chunk of change off my business over the last 6 years. If you can capture companies and projects in the infant stages, you can grow with them for quite a long time before it, if ever, becomes economical to roll your own infrastructure.
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#76It feels like a good product. I will try it soon!
One small piece of feedback. If you open your landing page from mobile, e.g. My iPhone 7, the header height is changing all the time due to the text changing dynamically. It get hard to scroll past it and keep reading.
Cheers
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#77I’m a Data Scientist and I work in a large-ish corp. We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of all of our infrastructure needs - we mostly focus only on data science. I would expect most medium and large enterprises to have the same setup. Why would they use FloydHub?
Smaller companies and startups, or medium sized companies that just start with ml/dl will find it very useful.
Currently working in a small startup and our data scientists (just a team of 6) are frequently fighting over the gpus in the office for time and online services atm are overpriced for our small budget.
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious how Microsoft's approach compares to what you have heard about Google's approach to ML as a service. My impression is that it looks kinda/sorta like it's internal approach/infrastructure...if you squint. Which also makes me curious about FloydHub's infrastructure. Any gory details?
Floyd’s Infrastructure runs entirely on Docker. That makes it backend agnostic (our cloud offering currently runs on AWS). Floydhub uses nvidia-docker for the deep learning jobs that require GPU. We also version the entire pipeline (code, data, params and environment) for exact reproducibility. GPUs instances are really expensive. One of the biggest challenges at the moment is around reducing this cost. Eg. Spot Inst…
Try deepdetect, it s easier than serving, though probably still less flexible when it comes to the TF backend.
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#79I’m a Data Scientist and I work in a large-ish corp. We have a dedicated engineering team who take care of all of our infrastructure needs - we mostly focus only on data science. I would expect most medium and large enterprises to have the same setup. Why would they use FloydHub?
I mean with DLaaS then you don't need an entire dedicated engineering team... Same reason you might use AWS.
Re: Launch HN: FloydHub (YC W17) – Heroku for Deep Learning
#80It feels like a good product. I will try it soon! One small piece of feedback. If you open your landing page from mobile, e.g. My iPhone 7, the header height is changing all the time due to the text changing dynamically. It get hard to scroll past it and keep reading. Cheers
Thanks - fixed now! :)