How TensorFlow works

Data Science, AI and ML
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TensorFlow allows developers to create dataflow graphs—structures that describe how data moves through a graph, or a series of processing nodes. Each node in the graph represents a mathematical operation, and each connection or edge between nodes is a multidimensional data array, or tensor.

TensorFlow provides all of this for the programmer by way of the Python language. Python is easy to learn and work with, and provides convenient ways to express how high-level abstractions can be coupled together. Nodes and tensors in TensorFlow are Python objects, and TensorFlow applications are themselves Python applications.

The actual math operations, however, are not performed in Python. The libraries of transformations that are available through TensorFlow are written as high-performance C++ binaries. Python just directs traffic between the pieces, and provides high-level programming abstractions to hook them together.
TensorFlow applications can be run on most any target that’s convenient: a local machine, a cluster in the cloud, iOS and Android devices, CPUs or GPUs. If you use Google’s own cloud, you can run TensorFlow on Google’s custom TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU) silicon for further acceleration. The resulting models created by TensorFlow, though, can be deployed on most any device where they will be used to serve predictions.
TensorFlow 2.0, released in October 2019, revamped the framework in many ways based on user feedback, to make it easier to work with (e.g., by using the relatively simple Keras API for model training) and more performant. Distributed training is easier to run thanks to a new API, and support for TensorFlow Lite makes it possible to deploy models on a greater variety of platforms. However, code written for earlier versions of TensorFlow must be rewritten—sometimes only slightly, sometimes significantly—to take maximum advantage of new TensorFlow 2.0 features.