The sagemaker-mlops package provides high-level orchestration capabilities for Amazon SageMaker workflows, including pipeline definitions, step implementations, and model building utilities.

This package sits at the top of the SageMaker SDK dependency hierarchy and orchestrates components from the Core, Train, and Serve packages. It resolves architectural violations by providing a dedicated home for workflow orchestration logic that needs to import from multiple lower-level packages.

The SageMaker SDK follows a clean 4-package architecture:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   Package Architecture                       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

                    MLOps (orchestration)
                   ↙      ↓      ↘
              Train     Core     Serve
                   ↘      ↓      ↙
                       Core

Dependency Rules:
✓ Core → nothing (foundation layer)
✓ Train → Core only
✓ Serve → Core only
✓ MLOps → Train, Serve, Core (orchestration layer)

• sagemaker-core: Foundation primitives (entities, parameters, functions, conditions, properties)
• sagemaker-train: Training functionality (estimators, processors, tuners)
• sagemaker-serve: Serving functionality (models, predictors, endpoints)
• sagemaker-mlops: Workflow orchestration (pipelines, steps, model building)

The following files were moved from sagemaker-core/src/sagemaker/core/workflow/ to establish clean architectural boundaries:

Core Orchestration (2 files):

• pipeline.py - Pipeline class for workflow definition
• steps.py - Base Step class and common step logic

Step Implementations (13 files):

• automl_step.py - AutoML training steps
• model_step.py - Model creation and registration steps
• callback_step.py - Callback steps for custom logic
• clarify_check_step.py - Model bias and explainability checks
• condition_step.py - Conditional execution steps
• emr_step.py - EMR cluster steps
• fail_step.py - Explicit failure steps
• function_step.py - Lambda function steps
• lambda_step.py - AWS Lambda invocation steps
• monitor_batch_transform_step.py - Batch transform monitoring
• notebook_job_step.py - Notebook execution steps
• quality_check_step.py - Model quality checks
• step_collections.py - Step collection utilities
• step_outputs.py - Step output handling

Utilities (6 files):

• _utils.py - Internal utilities
• _steps_compiler.py - Step compilation logic
• _repack_model.py - Model repackaging utilities
• _event_bridge_client_helper.py - EventBridge integration
• triggers.py - Pipeline triggers
• utilities.py - Public utility functions

Configuration (6 files):

• check_job_config.py - Quality check configuration
• parallelism_config.py - Parallel execution configuration
• pipeline_definition_config.py - Pipeline definition settings
• pipeline_experiment_config.py - Experiment tracking configuration
• retry.py - Retry policies
• selective_execution_config.py - Selective execution settings

ModelBuilder is now located in the sagemaker-serve package but is re-exported from MLOps for convenience.

The following primitive files remain in sagemaker-core/src/sagemaker/core/workflow/:

• entities.py - Base Entity and PipelineVariable classes
• parameters.py - Parameter type definitions
• functions.py - Pipeline functions (Join, JsonGet)
• execution_variables.py - ExecutionVariable
• conditions.py - Condition primitives
• properties.py - Property definitions
• pipeline_context.py - PipelineSession (refactored to remove Train/Serve imports)
• __init__.py - Package initialization

Install the package in editable mode for development:

pip install -e sagemaker-mlops

Or install all SageMaker packages together:

pip install -e sagemaker-core
pip install -e sagemaker-train
pip install -e sagemaker-serve
pip install -e sagemaker-mlops