Local Artifact Store
How to store artifacts on your local filesystem
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The local Artifact Store is a built-in ZenML Artifact Store flavor that uses a folder on your local filesystem to store artifacts.
When would you want to use it?
The local Artifact Store is a great way to get started with ZenML, as it doesn't require you to provision additional local resources, or to interact with managed object store services like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. All you need is the local filesystem. You should use the local Artifact Store if you're just evaluating or getting started with ZenML, or if you are still in the experimental phase and don't need to share your pipeline artifacts (dataset, models, etc.) with others.
The local Artifact Store is not meant to be utilized in production. The local filesystem cannot be shared across your team and doesn't cover services like high-availability, scalability, backup and restore and other features that are expected from a production grade MLOps system.
The fact that it stores artifacts on your local filesystem also means that not all stack components can be used in the same stack as a local Artifact Store:
only Orchestrators running on the local machine, such as the local Orchestrator, a local Kubeflow Orchestrator, or a local Kubernetes Orchestrator can be combined with a local Artifact Store
only Model Deployers that are running locally, such as the MLflow Model Deployer can only be used in combination with a local Artifact Store
Step Operators: none of the Step Operators can be used in the same stack as a local Artifact Store, given that their very purpose is to run ZenML steps in remote specialized environments
As you transition to a team setting or a production setting, you can replace the local Artifact Store in your stack with one of the other flavors that are better suited for these purposes, with no changes required in your code.
How do you deploy it?
The default stack that comes pre-configured with ZenML already contains a local Artifact Store:
As shown by the PATH value in the zenml artifact-store describe output, the artifacts are stored inside a folder on your local filesystem.
You can create additional instances of local Artifact Stores and use them in your stacks as you see fit, e.g.:
Same as all other Artifact Store flavors, the local Artifact Store does take in a path configuration parameter that can be set during registration to point to a custom path on your machine. However, it is highly recommended that you rely on the default path value, otherwise it may lead to unexpected results. Other local stack components depend on the convention used for the default path to be able to access the local Artifact Store.
For more, up-to-date information on the local Artifact Store implementation and its configuration, you can have a look at the API docs.
How do you use it?
Aside from the fact that the artifacts are stored locally, using the local Artifact Store is no different than using any other flavor of Artifact Store.
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