Why use an NLP Microservice?

When deploying an app with NLP features to production, there are many considerations related to deployment:

• CPU and RAM requirements + costs
• Build times
• Library dependencies and conflicts
• Model caching

Benefits of an NLP microservice

Here is a sample scenario illustrating the benefits of an NLP microservice:

Imagine your application runs on 4 containers (backend, web scraper, data ETL, ops worker) and ALL of these containers need to run NLP tasks. Your NLP models have a RAM requirement of 4Gb minimum, but your app containers can run on 1Gb of RAM. When deploying, you can either:

• Option 1 (no NLP microservice): Deploy 4 containers with 4GB of RAM and run NLP tasks on all of them. Total RAM used = 4 containers x 4Gb = 16Gb of RAM

• Option 2 (with NLP microservice): Deploy 4 containers with 1Gb of RAM + 1 NLP microservice with 4Gb of RAM Total RAM used = 4 containers x 1Gb + 1 container (nlp service) x 4Gb = 8Gb of RAM

By using an NLP microservice in this scenario, you are saving the costs of 8Gb of RAM. Besides costs, there are many other benefits to isolating NLP models and Transformers behind a microservice:

• Isolated dependencies: you can install any version of torch, sentence-transformers etc without worrying about dependency conflicts with your application
• Faster builds for your app by removing dependency to heavy libraries.
• Asynchronous tasks: instead of blocking your process to run an NLP task, you'd send an async request to the microservice, allowing you to run other tasks while waiting for the model response.

Build

docker build -t nlp-service .

Example

The repo includes a FastAPI app with an /embeddings endpoint, as well as a python client to call the service. If you don't want to rely on the microsevice, you can still call the NLP models by using source='local'. This will download the models to the specified cache directories and run the NLP task on the same processor as your app.

nlp_service = NLPService()
embeddings = loop.run_until_complete(nlp_service.get_embeddings("Your text here", source='app'))
embeddings = loop.run_until_complete(nlp_service.get_embeddings("Your text here", source='local'))