Feast Community Newsletter #3

[Danny Chiao]

Oct 25, 2021

Announcements

Feast related launches

Feast is getting ready for a new release to include push-based streaming support & official support (again) for deploying a Java Feature Server.   A few other exciting developments: Feast Serving (java repo) forward ported to support Feast 0.10+ and on-demand transformations using a python feature transformation server Official Azure support including tutorials (plugin repo) PostgreSQL support as offline + online store (plugin repo)  If you have questions on any of these, please reach out to the Feast team!

Blog posts and videos

Check out some new content featuring Feast: [Video] Feast Deep Dive feat. @felixwang9817 (video) [Article] 2021 machine learning, AI, and data landscape (link) [Blog] Feature Store for Data Science: Upward Journey Continues (post) [Blog] Is There a Feature Store Over the Rainbow? (post) [Blog] Feast 0.14 adds AWS Lambda Feature Servers (post) [Documentation] (available next release) Ability for custom offline/online store plugins to run Feast test suite (docs)

Upcoming events

Times below are in Pacific time:  Oct 26 @ 6PM: Feast community call (agenda, zoom link) Please add agenda items to discuss! Current topics include: Feature transformation server Moving Feast Java back into main repo Date/datetime types Oct 29 @2PM: Feast tech talk featuring @adchia (PyData Global talk) Nov 4 @12:15PM: Feature Engineering with Feast on AWS featuring @achals (AWS event link)

Community contribution highlights

Redis cluster materialization bug fix + Dask support (@qooba) Push API for streaming + Redis pipeline improvements (@vas28r13) Shadow entities implementation (@codyjlin) Snowflake integration (@milescadkins)

Work in progress

Streaming support

Initial support for pushing stream data into the online store is finalizing for a new Feast release. Remaining work will expose this API at the feature server level and define a StreamFeatureView.   RFC-026: Streaming Support in Feast

Low latency serving

Feast Java's data model has been forward-ported to work with the latest version of Feast. Feast Java will be ported to the main repo soon, and benchmarks are actively being worked on. Some investigation is being done around Arrow Flight for communication with the feature transformation server.   RFC-025: Online JVM Client RFC: Low Latency Serving

Shadow entities

There are use cases where there are multiple aliases for the same entity across different feature views. Implementation is complete and ready for release pending some documentation.   RFC-023: Shadow Entities Mapping

Miscellaneous

Other noteworthy ongoing work: Data quality monitoring (early investigations, @adchia) Scalable historical retrieval (@MattDelac, @mavysavydav) Snowflake offline store plugin (@milescadkins) Astra DB online store plugin (@hamzakpt) Alibaba Cloud plugin (@777ki) Trino offline store plugin (@MattDelac)

Join the conversation on Slack, give feedback on our roadmap, or checkout our GitHub!