Hugging Face has deepened its partnership with Microsoft by integrating its open-source model hub directly into Azure Machine Learning Studio. The new Hugging Face Hub Model Catalog gives users access to thousands of popular Transformers models, enabling one-click deployment on secure, scalable Azure infrastructure.
This native integration improves upon last year’s marketplace solution, addressing limitations such as complexity and lack of deep customization. With over 200,000 models and 1 million daily downloads, Hugging Face is the leading platform for machine learning, but deploying models to production has been a challenge. The new catalog simplifies this process while meeting strict security and compliance requirements.
"With the new Hugging Face Hub model catalog, natively integrated within Azure Machine Learning, we are opening a new page in our partnership with Microsoft, offering a super easy way for enterprise customers to deploy Hugging Face models for real-time inference, all within their secure Azure environment." — Julien Simon, Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face
"The integration of Hugging Face's open-source models into Azure Machine Learning represents our commitment to empowering developers with industry-leading AI tools. This collaboration not only simplifies the deployment process of large language models but also provides a secure and scalable environment for real-time inferencing. It's an exciting milestone in our mission to accelerate AI initiatives and bring innovative solutions to the market swiftly and securely, backed by the power of Azure infrastructure." — John Montgomery, Corporate Vice President, Azure AI Platform at Microsoft
To deploy a model: open the Hugging Face registry in Azure Machine Learning Studio, browse the catalog, filter by task or license, select a model, choose real-time deployment, pick an Azure instance, and deploy. The endpoint is ready for testing within minutes.
The Hugging Face Model Catalog on Azure Machine Learning is now available in public preview across all Azure regions supporting Azure Machine Learning.