RapidCanvas Concepts

Basic

User

Anyone with access to the web or notebook interface of RapidCanvas is a user. There are two types of users: Admin and Read-Only Users Admin users have a privilege to invite other team members to the tenant. All users get access to RC by invitation to join a tenant. All users can create and collaborate on projects in tenants to which they have access. A user can be part of multiple tenants with different roles.

Project

A project on RapidCanvas is typically an exercise to solve a business-relevant data science problem. Project is a combination of user and/or organizational assets such as data, recipes and dashboards. It encapsulates the journey from raw data to predicting whatever the business requires. A project output can be a productionized Machine learning model which predicts on new incoming data or it can be a dashboard which shows relevant data metrics for your team.

Use Case - Your marketing team would like to solve 2 problems.Recommend new products to users based on their past purchases and customize coupon recommendations for each user. Both of these can be tackled by creating 2 separate projects.

Projects are created in tenants, and can be associated to custom environments.

Canvas

Canvas in RapidCanvas is a dynamic acyclic graph (also called DAG) which allows business users to build a sequence of data input, data processing and modelling steps to build a project. The canvas provides a holistic view of the project and simplifies explainability.

A canvas consists of nodes and connectors. Nodes can be either data sets, recipes or dashboards. More about them in the next few sections.

Transform

A transform is a data processing unit which can take individual or multiple inputs and generate an output. A simple example of a transform can be concatenating 2 columns. Inputs can be first name and last name and the output can be the full name.

Advanced

Tenant

A tenant is a workspace for a group of users to work. Data and projects inside a tenant are only accessible to the users who are part of the tenant. Typically, organizations with large number of projects have multiple tenants to organize streams of AI/ML Problems they solve.

Environment

An environment is an infrastructure unit created under a tenant. It defines the compute resources and user-selected packages that you may need to run your projects. RapidCanvas provides a set of standard configurations of compute resources. In a tenant, users can create multiple custom environments. In a tenant, each project can be associated with a custom environment.

Standard configurations of compute resources provided by RapidCanvas are: + SMALL: 1 Core, 2GB Memory + MEDIUM: 2 Cores, 4GB Memory - LARGE: 4 Cores, 8GB Memory - CPU_LARGE: 8 Cores, 16GB Memory - MAX_LARGE: 12 Cores, 32GB Memory - EXTRA_MAX_LARGE: 12 Cores, 48GB Memory

Template

A template is a building block of the transform. A template defines the logic of the data transformation, the inputs that need to be passed and output that will be generated.

RapidCanvas provides a library of system templates, and is continuously adding more to the library. In case the system templates are not adequate, notebook users will be able to create templates as per their project needs. Business users on the web interface of RapidCanvas would see only Recipes and Transforms, and would be limited to the use of system templates and any custom templates developed and made available inside a tenant by their team of notebook users.

Artifact

Any project related asset such as models that are built by users can be saved as artifacts. These artifacts can be used across projects. Typically, generic and reusable assets are saved as artifacts and are used in multiple projects. Creating, saving and accessing artifacts is available only to notebook users currently.

Scenarios

A scenario is created with in a project and allows to run a project only when certain conditions are met. Scenarios can be used to run your project with different datasets and changing parameters which go into a recipe.

Segments

Within a project, Segments are subsets of your input data sets that meet user-defined conditions. Segments can be used to slice and dice your data and associate with scenarios. This allows you to run your scenarios with only some of the data.

Use Case - You have 12 months of historic data however you would like to build multiple models each with varying amount of historic data. You can create segments with 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months of data etc and create corresponding scenarios to build different models and compare their performance.

Solution

A project which solves a business problem end to end can be published as a solution in RapidCanvas. Solutions can be consumed by other users of RapidCanvas to build their projects and customize as per their needs.

Use Case - Your marketing team has built a project which can recommend new products to your users. It can be published as a solution. Internal teams who want to build a recommendation engine to recommend relevant courses to employees can use this solution and create a project to customize to their needs rather than starting from scratch.