Automating H2O Flow: run flow from CLI

Question

I’ve been an h2o user for a little over a year and a half now, but my work has been limited to the R api; h2o flow is relatively new to me. If it's new to you as well, it's basically 0xdata's version of iPython, however iPython let's you export your notebook to a script. I can't find a similar option in flow...

I’m at the point of moving a model (built in flow) to production, and I'm wondering how to automate it. With the R api, after the model was built and saved, I could easily load it in R and make predictions on the new data simply by running a nohup Rscript <the_file> & from CLI, but I’m not sure how I can do something similar with flow, especially since it’s running on Hadoop.

As it currently stands, every run is broken into three pieces with the flow creating a relatively clunky process in the middle:

• preprocess data, move it to hdfs
• start h2o on hadoop, nslookup the IP address h2o is running on, manually run the flow cell-by-cell
• run the post-prediction clean-up and final steps

This is a terribly intrusive production process, and I want to tie all the ends up, however flow is making it rather difficult. To distill the question: is there a way to compress the flow into a hadoop jar and then later just run the jar like hadoop jar <my_flow_jar.jar> ...?

Edit:

Here's the h2o R package documentation. The R API allows you to load an H2O model, so I tried loading the flow (as if it were an H2O model), and unsurprisingly it did not work (failed with a water.api.FSIOException) as it's not technically an h2o model.

Answer 1

This is really late, but (now) h2o flow models have auto-generated java code that represents the trained model (called a POJO) that can be cut and pasted (say from your remote hadoop session to a local java file). See here for a quickstart tutorial on how to use the java object (https://h2o-release.s3.amazonaws.com/h2o/rel-turing/1/docs-website/h2o-docs/pojo-quick-start.html). You'll have to refer to the h2o java api (https://h2o-release.s3.amazonaws.com/h2o/rel-turing/8/docs-website/h2o-genmodel/javadoc/hex/genmodel/easy/EasyPredictModelWrapper.html) to start customizing how you want to use the POJO, but you essentially use it as a black box that makes predictions on properly formated inputs.

Assuming you hadoop session is remote, replace "localhost" in the example with the IP address of your (remote) flow session.