Aspects of the disclosure are directed to a central management plane (CMP) of one or more processors for regulating streams of data from each of a number of network nodes of a distributed network. The one or more processors can train and deploy machine learning models across the network nodes, and the CMP can generate policies for each network node. The generated policies specify how a network node is to transmit data to the platform for further training or retraining of the deployed machine learning models. The CMP generates the policies using metric data characterizing each network node and respective streams of input data, and are generated based on a number of objectives, including model output quality of the deployed models, and operational cost to transmit and process streams of data across the distributed network.