The top-level namespace within Feast is a project. Users define one or more feature views within a project. Each feature view contains one or more features. These features typically relate to one or more entities. A feature view must always have a data source, which in turn is used during the generation of training datasets and when materializing feature values into the online store.

Project

Projects provide complete isolation of feature stores at the infrastructure level. This is accomplished through resource namespacing, e.g., prefixing table names with the associated project. Each project should be considered a completely separate universe of entities and features. It is not possible to retrieve features from multiple projects in a single request. We recommend having a single feature store and a single project per environment (dev, staging, prod).

Links & Resources

• Slack: Feel free to ask questions or say hello!

• Mailing list: We have both a user and developer mailing list.

  • Feast users should join feast-discuss@googlegroups.com group by clicking here.

  • Feast developers should join feast-dev@googlegroups.com group by clicking here.

  • People interested in the Feast community newsletter should join feast-announce by clicking here.

• Community Calendar: Includes community calls and design meetings.

• Google Folder: This folder is used as a central repository for all Feast resources. For example:

  • Design proposals in the form of Request for Comments (RFC).

  • User surveys and meeting minutes.

  • Slide decks of conferences our contributors have spoken at.

• Feast GitHub Repository: Find the complete Feast codebase on GitHub.

• Feast Linux Foundation Wiki: Our LFAI wiki page contains links to resources for contributors and maintainers.

How can I get help?

• Slack: Need to speak to a human? Come ask a question in our Slack channel (link above).

• GitHub Issues: Found a bug or need a feature? Create an issue on GitHub.

• StackOverflow: Need to ask a question on how to use Feast? We also monitor and respond to StackOverflow.

Community Calls

We have a user and contributor community call every two weeks (Asia & US friendly).

Frequency (every 2 weeks)

• Tuesday 10:00 am to 10:30 am PST

Links

• Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/6325193230

• Meeting notes (incl recordings): https://bit.ly/feast-notes

Feature views

A feature view is an object that represents a logical group of time-series feature data as it is found in a . Feature views consist of zero or more , one or more , and a . Feature views allow Feast to model your existing feature data in a consistent way in both an offline (training) and online (serving) environment. Feature views generally contain features that are properties of a specific object, in which case that object is defined as an entity and included in the feature view. If the features are not related to a specific object, the feature view might not have entities; see below.

Feature views are used during

• The generation of training datasets by querying the data source of feature views in order to find historical feature values. A single training dataset may consist of features from multiple feature views.

• Loading of feature values into an online store. Feature views determine the storage schema in the online store. Feature values can be loaded from batch sources or from .

• Retrieval of features from the online store. Feature views provide the schema definition to Feast in order to look up features from the online store.

Feature views without entities

If a feature view contains features that are not related to a specific entity, the feature view can be defined without entities (only event timestamps are needed for this feature view).

Feature inferencing

If the features parameter is not specified in the feature view creation, Feast will infer the features during feast apply by creating a feature for each column in the underlying data source except the columns corresponding to the entities of the feature view or the columns corresponding to the timestamp columns of the feature view's data source. The names and value types of the inferred features will use the names and data types of the columns from which the features were inferred.

Entity aliasing

"Entity aliases" can be specified to join entity_dataframe columns that do not match the column names in the source table of a FeatureView.

This could be used if a user has no control over these column names or if there are multiple entities are a subclass of a more general entity. For example, "spammer" and "reporter" could be aliases of a "user" entity, and "origin" and "destination" could be aliases of a "location" entity as shown below.

It is suggested that you dynamically specify the new FeatureView name using .with_name and join_key_map override using .with_join_key_map instead of needing to register each new copy.

Feature

A feature is an individual measurable property. It is typically a property observed on a specific entity, but does not have to be associated with an entity. For example, a feature of a customer entity could be the number of transactions they have made on an average month, while a feature that is not observed on a specific entity could be the total number of posts made by all users in the last month.

Features are defined as part of feature views. Since Feast does not transform data, a feature is essentially a schema that only contains a name and a type:

[Alpha] On demand feature views

On demand feature views allows users to use existing features and request time data (features only available at request time) to transform and create new features. Users define python transformation logic which is executed in both historical retrieval and online retrieval paths:

In this tutorial we will

1. Deploy a local feature store with a Parquet file offline store and Sqlite online store.

2. Build a training dataset using our time series features from our Parquet files.

3. Materialize feature values from the offline store into the online store.

4. Read the latest features from the online store for inference.

You can run this tutorial in Google Colab or run it on your localhost, following the guided steps below.

Overview

In this tutorial, we use feature stores to generate training data and power online model inference for a ride-sharing driver satisfaction prediction model. Feast solves several common issues in this flow:

1. Training-serving skew and complex data joins: Feature values often exist across multiple tables. Joining these datasets can be complicated, slow, and error-prone.

   • Feast joins these tables with battle-tested logic that ensures point-in-time correctness so future feature values do not leak to models.

   • Feast alerts users to offline / online skew with data quality monitoring

2. Online feature availability: At inference time, models often need access to features that aren't readily available and need to be precomputed from other datasources.

   • Feast manages deployment to a variety of online stores (e.g. DynamoDB, Redis, Google Cloud Datastore) and ensures necessary features are consistently available and freshly computed at inference time.

3. Feature reusability and model versioning: Different teams within an organization are often unable to reuse features across projects, resulting in duplicate feature creation logic. Models have data dependencies that need to be versioned, for example when running A/B tests on model versions.

   • Feast enables discovery of and collaboration on previously used features and enables versioning of sets of features (via feature services).

   • Feast enables feature transformation so users can re-use transformation logic across online / offline usecases and across models.

Step 1: Install Feast

Install the Feast SDK and CLI using pip:

Step 2: Create a feature repository

Bootstrap a new feature repository using feast init from the command line.

Let's take a look at the resulting demo repo itself. It breaks down into

• data/ contains raw demo parquet data

• example.py contains demo feature definitions

• feature_store.yaml contains a demo setup configuring where data sources are

The key line defining the overall architecture of the feature store is the provider. This defines where the raw data exists (for generating training data & feature values for serving), and where to materialize feature values to in the online store (for serving).

Valid values for provider in feature_store.yaml are:

• local: use file source with SQLite/Redis

• gcp: use BigQuery/Snowflake with Google Cloud Datastore/Redis

• aws: use Redshift/Snowflake with DynamoDB/Redis

Step 3: Register feature definitions and deploy your feature store

The apply command scans python files in the current directory for feature view/entity definitions, registers the objects, and deploys infrastructure. In this example, it reads example.py (shown again below for convenience) and sets up SQLite online store tables. Note that we had specified SQLite as the default online store by using the local provider in feature_store.yaml.

Step 4: Generating training data

To train a model, we need features and labels. Often, this label data is stored separately (e.g. you have one table storing user survey results and another set of tables with feature values).

The user can query that table of labels with timestamps and pass that into Feast as an entity dataframe for training data generation. In many cases, Feast will also intelligently join relevant tables to create the relevant feature vectors.

• Note that we include timestamps because want the features for the same driver at various timestamps to be used in a model.

Step 5: Load features into your online store

We now serialize the latest values of features since the beginning of time to prepare for serving (note: materialize-incremental serializes all new features since the last materialize call).

Step 6: Fetching feature vectors for inference

At inference time, we need to quickly read the latest feature values for different drivers (which otherwise might have existed only in batch sources) from the online feature store using get_online_features(). These feature vectors can then be fed to the model.

Next steps

Dataset

A dataset is a collection of rows that is produced by a historical retrieval from Feast in order to train a model. A dataset is produced by a join from one or more feature views onto an entity dataframe. Therefore, a dataset may consist of features from multiple feature views.

Dataset vs Feature View: Feature views contain the schema of data and a reference to where data can be found (through its data source). Datasets are the actual data manifestation of querying those data sources.

Dataset vs Data Source: Datasets are the output of historical retrieval, whereas data sources are the inputs. One or more data sources can be used in the creation of a dataset.

Feature References

Feature references uniquely identify feature values in Feast. The structure of a feature reference in string form is as follows: <feature_view>:<feature>

Feature references are used for the retrieval of features from Feast:

online_features = fs.get_online_features(
    features=[
        'driver_locations:lon',
        'drivers_activity:trips_today'
    ],
    entity_rows=[
        # {join_key: entity_value}
        {'driver': 'driver_1001'}
    ]
)

It is possible to retrieve features from multiple feature views with a single request, and Feast is able to join features from multiple tables in order to build a training dataset. However, It is not possible to reference (or retrieve) features from multiple projects at the same time.

Event timestamp

The timestamp on which an event occurred, as found in a feature view's data source. The event timestamp describes the event time at which a feature was observed or generated.

Event timestamps are used during point-in-time joins to ensure that the latest feature values are joined from feature views onto entity rows. Event timestamps are also used to ensure that old feature values aren't served to models during online serving.

The list below contains the functionality that contributors are planning to develop for Feast

• Items below that are in development (or planned for development) will be indicated in parentheses.

• We welcome contribution to all items in the roadmap!

• Want to influence our roadmap and prioritization? Submit your feedback to this form.

• Want to speak to a Feast contributor? We are more than happy to jump on a call. Please schedule a time using Calendly.

• Data Sources

  • Snowflake source

  • Redshift source

  • BigQuery source

  • Parquet file source

  • Synapse source (community plugin)

  • Hive (community plugin)

  • Postgres (community plugin)

  • Spark (community plugin)

  • Kafka / Kinesis sources (via push support into the online store)

  • HTTP source

• Offline Stores

  • Snowflake

  • Redshift

  • BigQuery

  • Synapse (community plugin)

  • Hive (community plugin)

  • Postgres (community plugin)

  • Trino (community plugin)

  • Spark (community plugin)

  • In-memory / Pandas

  • Custom offline store support

• Online Stores

  • DynamoDB

  • Redis

  • Datastore

  • SQLite

  • Azure Cache for Redis (community plugin)

  • Postgres (community plugin)

  • Custom online store support

  • Bigtable (in progress)

  • Cassandra

• Streaming

  • Custom streaming ingestion job support

  • Push based streaming data ingestion

  • Streaming ingestion on AWS

  • Streaming ingestion on GCP

• Feature Engineering

  • On-demand Transformations (Alpha release. See RFC)

  • Batch transformation (In progress. See RFC)

  • Streaming transformation

• Deployments

  • AWS Lambda (Alpha release. See RFC)

  • Kubernetes (See guide)

  • Cloud Run

  • KNative

• Feature Serving

  • Python Client

  • REST Feature Server (Python) (Alpha release. See RFC)

  • gRPC Feature Server (Java) (See #1497)

  • Push API

  • Java Client

  • Go Client

  • Delete API

  • Feature Logging (for training)

• Data Quality Management (See RFC)

  • Data profiling and validation (Great Expectations)

  • Training-serving skew detection (in progress)

  • Metric production

  • Drift detection

• Feature Discovery and Governance

  • Python SDK for browsing feature registry

  • CLI for browsing feature registry

  • Model-centric feature tracking (feature services)

  • Amundsen integration (see Feast extractor)

  • Feast Web UI (alpha)

  • REST API for browsing feature registry

  • Feature versioning

A feature service is an object that represents a logical group of features from one or more feature views. Feature Services allows features from within a feature view to be used as needed by an ML model. Users can expect to create one feature service per model, allowing for tracking of the features used by models.

from driver_ratings_feature_view import driver_ratings_fv
from driver_trips_feature_view import driver_stats_fv

driver_stats_fs = FeatureService(
    name="driver_activity",
    features=[driver_stats_fv, driver_ratings_fv[["lifetime_rating"]]]
)

Feature services are used during

• The generation of training datasets when querying feature views in order to find historical feature values. A single training dataset may consist of features from multiple feature views.

• Retrieval of features from the online store. The features retrieved from the online store may also belong to multiple feature views.

Feature services can be retrieved from the feature store, and referenced when retrieving features from the online store.

from feast import FeatureStore
feature_store = FeatureStore('.')  # Initialize the feature store

feature_service = feature_store.get_feature_service("driver_activity")
features = feature_store.get_online_features(
    features=feature_service, entity_rows=[entity_dict]
)

Feature services can also be used when retrieving historical features from the offline store.

from feast import FeatureStore
feature_store = FeatureStore('.')  # Initialize the feature store

feature_service = feature_store.get_feature_service("driver_activity")
feature_store.get_historical_features(features=feature_service, entity_df=entity_df)

What is Feast?

Feast (Feature Store) is an operational data system for managing and serving machine learning features to models in production. Feast is able to serve feature data to models from a low-latency online store (for real-time prediction) or from an offline store (for scale-out batch scoring or model training).

Problems Feast Solves

Models need consistent access to data: Machine Learning (ML) systems built on traditional data infrastructure are often coupled to databases, object stores, streams, and files. A result of this coupling, however, is that any change in data infrastructure may break dependent ML systems. Another challenge is that dual implementations of data retrieval for training and serving can lead to inconsistencies in data, which in turn can lead to training-serving skew.

Feast decouples your models from your data infrastructure by providing a single data access layer that abstracts feature storage from feature retrieval. Feast also provides a consistent means of referencing feature data for retrieval, and therefore ensures that models remain portable when moving from training to serving.

Deploying new features into production is difficult: Many ML teams consist of members with different objectives. Data scientists, for example, aim to deploy features into production as soon as possible, while engineers want to ensure that production systems remain stable. These differing objectives can create an organizational friction that slows time-to-market for new features.

Feast addresses this friction by providing both a centralized registry to which data scientists can publish features and a battle-hardened serving layer. Together, these enable non-engineering teams to ship features into production with minimal oversight.

Models need point-in-time correct data: ML models in production require a view of data consistent with the one on which they are trained, otherwise the accuracy of these models could be compromised. Despite this need, many data science projects suffer from inconsistencies introduced by future feature values being leaked to models during training.

Feast solves the challenge of data leakage by providing point-in-time correct feature retrieval when exporting feature datasets for model training.

Features aren't reused across projects: Different teams within an organization are often unable to reuse features across projects. The siloed nature of development and the monolithic design of end-to-end ML systems contribute to duplication of feature creation and usage across teams and projects.

Feast addresses this problem by introducing feature reuse through a centralized registry. This registry enables multiple teams working on different projects not only to contribute features, but also to reuse these same features. With Feast, data scientists can start new ML projects by selecting previously engineered features from a centralized registry, and are no longer required to develop new features for each project.

Problems Feast does not yet solve

Feature engineering: We aim for Feast to support light-weight feature engineering as part of our API.

Feature discovery: We also aim for Feast to include a first-class user interface for exploring and discovering entities and features.

Feature validation: We additionally aim for Feast to improve support for statistics generation of feature data and subsequent validation of these statistics. Current support is limited.

What Feast is not

ETL or ELT system: Feast is not (and does not plan to become) a general purpose data transformation or pipelining system. Feast plans to include a light-weight feature engineering toolkit, but we encourage teams to integrate Feast with upstream ETL/ELT systems that are specialized in transformation.

Data warehouse: Feast is not a replacement for your data warehouse or the source of truth for all transformed data in your organization. Rather, Feast is a light-weight downstream layer that can serve data from an existing data warehouse (or other data sources) to models in production.

Data catalog: Feast is not a general purpose data catalog for your organization. Feast is purely focused on cataloging features for use in ML pipelines or systems, and only to the extent of facilitating the reuse of features.

How can I get started?

Explore the following resources to get started with Feast:

• Quickstart is the fastest way to get started with Feast

• Concepts describes all important Feast API concepts

• Architecture describes Feast's overall architecture.

• Tutorials shows full examples of using Feast in machine learning applications.

• Running Feast with Snowflake/GCP/AWS provides a more in-depth guide to using Feast.

• Reference contains detailed API and design documents.

• Contributing contains resources for anyone who wants to contribute to Feast.

The data source refers to raw underlying data (e.g. a table in BigQuery).

Feast uses a time-series data model to represent data. This data model is used to interpret feature data in data sources in order to build training datasets or when materializing features into an online store.

Below is an example data source with a single entity (driver) and two features (trips_today, and rating).

An entity is a collection of semantically related features. Users define entities to map to the domain of their use case. For example, a ride-hailing service could have customers and drivers as their entities, which group related features that correspond to these customers and drivers.

driver = Entity(name='driver', value_type=ValueType.STRING, join_keys=['driver_id'])

Entities are typically defined as part of feature views. Entity name is used to reference the entity from a feature view definition and join key is used to identify the physical primary key on which feature values should be stored and retrieved. These keys are used during the lookup of feature values from the online store and the join process in point-in-time joins. It is possible to define composite entities (more than one entity object) in a feature view. It is also possible for feature views to have zero entities. See feature view for more details.

Entities should be reused across feature views.

Entity key

A related concept is an entity key. These are one or more entity values that uniquely describe a feature view record. In the case of an entity (like a driver) that only has a single entity field, the entity is an entity key. However, it is also possible for an entity key to consist of multiple entity values. For example, a feature view with the composite entity of (customer, country) might have an entity key of (1001, 5).

Entity keys act as primary keys. They are used during the lookup of features from the online store, and they are also used to match feature rows across feature views during point-in-time joins.

The Feast feature registry is a central catalog of all the feature definitions and their related metadata. It allows data scientists to search, discover, and collaborate on new features.

Each Feast deployment has a single feature registry. Feast only supports file-based registries today, but supports three different backends

• Local: Used as a local backend for storing the registry during development

• S3: Used as a centralized backend for storing the registry on AWS

• GCS: Used as a centralized backend for storing the registry on GCP

The feature registry is updated during different operations when using Feast. More specifically, objects within the registry (entities, feature views, feature services) are updated when running apply from the Feast CLI, but metadata about objects can also be updated during operations like materialization.

Users interact with a feature registry through the Feast SDK. Listing all feature views:

Or retrieving a specific feature view:

Functionality

• Create Batch Features: ELT/ETL systems like Spark and SQL are used to transform data in the batch store.

• Feast Apply: The user (or CI) publishes versioned controlled feature definitions using feast apply. This CLI command updates infrastructure and persists definitions in the object store registry.

• Feast Materialize: The user (or scheduler) executes feast materialize which loads features from the offline store into the online store.

• Model Training: A model training pipeline is launched. It uses the Feast Python SDK to retrieve a training dataset and trains a model.

• Get Historical Features: Feast exports a point-in-time correct training dataset based on the list of features and entity dataframe provided by the model training pipeline.

• Deploy Model: The trained model binary (and list of features) are deployed into a model serving system. This step is not executed by Feast.

• Prediction: A backend system makes a request for a prediction from the model serving service.

• Get Online Features: The model serving service makes a request to the Feast Online Serving service for online features using a Feast SDK.

Components

A complete Feast deployment contains the following components:

• Feast Registry: An object store (GCS, S3) based registry used to persist feature definitions that are registered with the feature store. Systems can discover feature data by interacting with the registry through the Feast SDK.

• Feast Python SDK/CLI: The primary user facing SDK. Used to:

  • Manage version controlled feature definitions.

  • Materialize (load) feature values into the online store.

  • Build and retrieve training datasets from the offline store.

  • Retrieve online features.

• Offline Store: The offline store persists batch data that has been ingested into Feast. This data is used for producing training datasets. Feast does not manage the offline store directly, but runs queries against it.

Feature values in Feast are modeled as time-series records. Below is an example of a driver feature view with two feature columns (trips_today, and earnings_today):

The above table can be registered with Feast through the following feature view:

Feast is able to join features from one or more feature views onto an entity dataframe in a point-in-time correct way. This means Feast is able to reproduce the state of features at a specific point in the past.

Given the following entity dataframe, imagine a user would like to join the above driver_hourly_stats feature view onto it, while preserving the trip_success column:

The timestamps within the entity dataframe above are the events at which we want to reproduce the state of the world (i.e., what the feature values were at those specific points in time). In order to do a point-in-time join, a user would load the entity dataframe and run historical retrieval:

For each row within the entity dataframe, Feast will query and join the selected features from the appropriate feature view data source. Feast will scan backward in time from the entity dataframe timestamp up to a maximum of the TTL time.

Below is the resulting joined training dataframe. It contains both the original entity rows and joined feature values:

Three feature rows were successfully joined to the entity dataframe rows. The first row in the entity dataframe was older than the earliest feature rows in the feature view and could not be joined. The last row in the entity dataframe was outside of the TTL window (the event happened 11 hours after the feature row) and also couldn't be joined.

A provider is an implementation of a feature store using specific feature store components (e.g. offline store, online store) targeting a specific environment (e.g. GCP stack).

Providers orchestrate various components (offline store, online store, infrastructure, compute) inside an environment. For example, the gcp provider supports as an offline store and as an online store, ensuring that these components can work together seamlessly. Feast has three built-in providers (local, gcp, and aws) with default configurations that make it easy for users to start a feature store in a specific environment. These default configurations can be overridden easily. For instance, you can use the gcp provider but use Redis as the online store instead of Datastore.

If the built-in providers are not sufficient, you can create your own custom provider. Please see for more details.

Please see for configuring providers.

We integrate with a wide set of tools and technologies so you can make Feast work in your existing stack. Many of these integrations are maintained as plugins to the main Feast repo.

Integrations

Data Sources

• Kafka / Kinesis sources (via )

• HTTP source

Offline Stores

Online Stores

• Bigtable (in progress)

• Cassandra

Deployments

• Cloud Run

• KNative

Standards

In order for a plugin integration to be highlighted on this page, it must meet the following requirements:

2. The plugin must have some basic documentation on how it should be used.

3. The author must work with a maintainer to pass a basic code review (e.g. to ensure that the implementation roughly matches the core Feast implementations).

In order for a plugin integration to be merged into the main Feast repo, it must meet the following requirements:

1. The PR must pass all integration tests. The universal tests (tests specifically designed for custom integrations) must be updated to test the integration.

2. There is documentation and a tutorial on how to use the integration.

3. The author (or someone else) agrees to take ownership of all the files, and maintain those files going forward.

4. If the plugin is being contributed by an organization, and not an individual, the organization should provide the infrastructure (or credits) for integration tests.

In this example, you'll learn how to use some of the key functionality in Feast. The tutorial runs in both local mode and on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). For GCP, you must have access to a GCP project already, including read and write permissions to BigQuery.

This tutorial guides you on how to use Feast with . You will learn how to:

• Train a model locally (on your laptop) using data from

• Test the model for online inference using (for fast iteration)

• Test the model for online inference using (for production use)

Try it and let us know what you think!

Feast uses offline stores as storage and compute systems. Offline stores store historic time-series feature values. Feast does not generate these features, but instead uses the offline store as the interface for querying existing features in your organization.

Offline stores are used primarily for two reasons

1. Building training datasets from time-series features.

2. Materializing (loading) features from the offline store into an online store in order to serve those features at low latency for prediction.

Offline stores are configured through the . When building training datasets or materializing features into an online store, Feast will use the configured offline store along with the data sources you have defined as part of feature views to execute the necessary data operations.

It is not possible to query all data sources from all offline stores, and only a single offline store can be used at a time. For example, it is not possible to query a BigQuery table from a File offline store, nor is it possible for a BigQuery offline store to query files from your local file system.

Please see the reference for more details on configuring offline stores.

The Feast online store is used for low-latency online feature value lookups. Feature values are loaded into the online store from data sources in feature views using the materialize command.

The storage schema of features within the online store mirrors that of the data source used to populate the online store. One key difference between the online store and data sources is that only the latest feature values are stored per entity key. No historical values are stored.

Example batch data source

Once the above data source is materialized into Feast (using feast materialize), the feature values will be stored as follows:

Feast datasets allow for conveniently saving dataframes that include both features and entities to be subsequently used for data analysis and model training. was the primary motivation for creating dataset concept.

Dataset's metadata is stored in the Feast registry and raw data (features, entities, additional input keys and timestamp) is stored in the .

Dataset can be created from:

1. Results of historical retrieval

2. [planned] Logging request (including input for ) and response during feature serving

3. [planned] Logging features during writing to online store (from batch source or stream)

Creating Saved Dataset from Historical Retrieval

To create a saved dataset from historical features for later retrieval or analysis, a user needs to call get_historical_features method first and then pass the returned retrieval job to create_saved_dataset method. create_saved_dataset will trigger provided retrieval job (by calling .persist() on it) to store the data using specified storage. Storage type must be the same as globally configured offline store (eg, it's impossible to persist data to Redshift with BigQuery source). create_saved_dataset will also create SavedDataset object with all related metadata and will write it to the registry.

Saved dataset can be later retrieved using get_saved_dataset method:

These Feast tutorials showcase how to use Feast to simplify end to end model training / serving.

Getting started

Do you have any examples of how Feast should be used?

The is the easiest way to learn about Feast. For more detailed tutorials, please check out the page.

Concepts

What is the difference between feature tables and feature views?

Feature tables from Feast 0.9 have been renamed to feature views in Feast 0.10+. For more details, please see the discussion .

Do feature views have to include entities?

No, there are .

What is the difference between data sources and the offline store?

The data source itself defines the underlying data warehouse table in which the features are stored. The offline store interface defines the APIs required to make an arbitrary compute layer work for Feast (e.g. pulling features given a set of feature views from their sources, exporting the data set results to different formats). Please see and for more details.

Is it possible to have offline and online stores from different providers?

Yes, this is possible. For example, you can use BigQuery as an offline store and Redis as an online store.

Functionality

Does Feast provide security or access control?

Feast currently does not support any access control other than the access control required for the Provider's environment (for example, GCP and AWS permissions).

Does Feast support streaming sources?

Does Feast support composite keys?

A feature view can be defined with multiple entities. Since each entity has a unique join_key, using multiple entities will achieve the effect of a composite key.

How does Feast compare with Tecton?

What are the performance/latency characteristics of Feast?

Does Feast support embeddings and list features?

Yes. Specifically:

• Simple lists / dense embeddings:

  • BigQuery supports list types natively

  • Redshift does not support list types, so you'll need to serialize these features into strings (e.g. json or protocol buffers)
• Sparse embeddings (e.g. one hot encodings)

Does Feast support X storage engine?

Does Feast support using different clouds for offline vs online stores?

Yes. Using a GCP or AWS provider in feature_store.yaml primarily sets default offline / online stores and configures where the remote registry file can live (Using the AWS provider also allows for deployment to AWS Lambda). You can override the offline and online stores to be in different clouds if you wish.

How can I add a custom online store?

Can the same storage engine be used for both the offline and online store?

Does Feast support S3 as a data source?

Yes. There are two ways to use S3 in Feast:

• Using the s3_endpoint_override in a FileSource data source. This endpoint is more suitable for quick proof of concepts that won't necessarily scale for production use cases.

How can I use Spark with Feast?

Is Feast planning on supporting X functionality?

Project

What is the difference between Feast 0.9 and Feast 0.10+?

How do I migrate from Feast 0.9 to Feast 0.10+?

How do I contribute to Feast?

What are the plans for Feast Core, Feast Serving, and Feast Spark?

Install Feast using pip:

pip install feast

Install Feast with Snowflake dependencies (required when using Snowflake):

pip install 'feast[snowflake]'

Install Feast with GCP dependencies (required when using BigQuery or Firestore):

pip install 'feast[gcp]'

Install Feast with AWS dependencies (required when using Redshift or DynamoDB):

pip install 'feast[aws]'

Install Feast with Redis dependencies (required when using Redis, either through AWS Elasticache or independently):

pip install 'feast[redis]'

A feature repository is a directory that contains the configuration of the feature store and individual features. This configuration is written as code (Python/YAML) and it's highly recommended that teams track it centrally using git. See Feature Repository for a detailed explanation of feature repositories.

The easiest way to create a new feature repository to use feast init command:

feast init

Creating a new Feast repository in /<...>/tiny_pika.

feast init -t snowflake
Snowflake Deployment URL: ...
Snowflake User Name: ...
Snowflake Password: ...
Snowflake Role Name: ...
Snowflake Warehouse Name: ...
Snowflake Database Name: ...

Creating a new Feast repository in /<...>/tiny_pika.

feast init -t gcp

Creating a new Feast repository in /<...>/tiny_pika.

feast init -t aws
AWS Region (e.g. us-west-2): ...
Redshift Cluster ID: ...
Redshift Database Name: ...
Redshift User Name: ...
Redshift S3 Staging Location (s3://*): ...
Redshift IAM Role for S3 (arn:aws:iam::*:role/*): ...
Should I upload example data to Redshift (overwriting 'feast_driver_hourly_stats' table)? (Y/n):

Creating a new Feast repository in /<...>/tiny_pika.

The init command creates a Python file with feature definitions, sample data, and a Feast configuration file for local development:

$ tree
.
└── tiny_pika
    ├── data
    │   └── driver_stats.parquet
    ├── example.py
    └── feature_store.yaml

1 directory, 3 files

Enter the directory:

# Replace "tiny_pika" with your auto-generated dir name
cd tiny_pika

You can now use this feature repository for development. You can try the following:

• Run feast apply to apply these definitions to Feast.

• Edit the example feature definitions in example.py and run feast apply again to change feature definitions.

• Initialize a git repository in the same directory and checking the feature repository into version control.

In the steps below, we will set up a sample Feast project that leverages Snowflake as an offline store.

Starting with data in a Snowflake table, we will register that table to the feature store and define features associated with the columns in that table. From there, we will generate historical training data based on those feature definitions and then materialize the latest feature values into the online store. Lastly, we will retrieve the materialized feature values.

Our template will generate new data containing driver statistics. From there, we will show you code snippets that will call to the offline store for generating training datasets, and then the code for calling the online store to serve you the latest feature values to serve models in production.

Snowflake Offline Store Example

Install feast-snowflake

pip install 'feast[snowflake]'

Get a Snowflake Trial Account (Optional)

Snowflake Trial Account

Create a feature repository

feast init -t snowflake {feature_repo_name}
Snowflake Deployment URL (exclude .snowflakecomputing.com):
Snowflake User Name::
Snowflake Password::
Snowflake Role Name (Case Sensitive)::
Snowflake Warehouse Name (Case Sensitive)::
Snowflake Database Name (Case Sensitive)::
Should I upload example data to Snowflake (overwrite table)? [Y/n]: Y
cd {feature_repo_name}

The following files will automatically be created in your project folder:

• feature_store.yaml -- This is your main configuration file

• driver_repo.py -- This is your main feature definition file

• test.py -- This is a file to test your feature store configuration

Inspect feature_store.yaml

Here you will see the information that you entered. This template will use Snowflake as an offline store and SQLite as the online store. The main thing to remember is by default, Snowflake objects have ALL CAPS names unless lower case was specified.

project: ...
registry: ...
provider: local
offline_store:
    type: snowflake.offline
    account: SNOWFLAKE_DEPLOYMENT_URL #drop .snowflakecomputing.com
    user: USERNAME
    password: PASSWORD
    role: ROLE_NAME #case sensitive
    warehouse: WAREHOUSE_NAME #case sensitive
    database: DATABASE_NAME #case cap sensitive

Run our test python script test.py

python test.py

What we did in test.py

Initialize our Feature Store

from datetime import datetime, timedelta

import pandas as pd
from driver_repo import driver, driver_stats_fv

from feast import FeatureStore

fs = FeatureStore(repo_path=".")

fs.apply([driver, driver_stats_fv])

Create a dummy training dataframe, then call our offline store to add additional columns

entity_df = pd.DataFrame(
    {
        "event_timestamp": [
            pd.Timestamp(dt, unit="ms", tz="UTC").round("ms")
            for dt in pd.date_range(
                start=datetime.now() - timedelta(days=3),
                end=datetime.now(),
                periods=3,
            )
        ],
        "driver_id": [1001, 1002, 1003],
    }
)

features = ["driver_hourly_stats:conv_rate", "driver_hourly_stats:acc_rate"]

training_df = fs.get_historical_features(
    features=features, entity_df=entity_df
).to_df()

Materialize the latest feature values into our online store

fs.materialize_incremental(end_date=datetime.now())

Retrieve the latest values from our online store based on our entity key

online_features = fs.get_online_features(
    features=features,
    entity_rows=[
      # {join_key: entity_value}
      {"driver_id": 1001},
      {"driver_id": 1002}
    ],
).to_dict()

In this tutorial, we will use the public dataset of Chicago taxi trips to present data validation capabilities of Feast.

• The original dataset is stored in BigQuery and consists of raw data for each taxi trip (one row per trip) since 2013.

• We will generate several training datasets (aka historical features in Feast) for different periods and evaluate expectations made on one dataset against another.

Types of features we're ingesting and generating:

• Features that aggregate raw data with daily intervals (eg, trips per day, average fare or speed for a specific day, etc.).

• Features using SQL while pulling data from BigQuery (like total trips time or total miles travelled).

• Features calculated on the fly when requested using Feast's on-demand transformations

Our plan:

1. Prepare environment

2. Pull data from BigQuery (optional)

3. Declare & apply features and feature views in Feast

4. Generate reference dataset

5. Develop & test profiler function

6. Run validation on different dataset using reference dataset & profiler

The original notebook and datasets for this tutorial can be found on GitHub.

0. Setup

Install Feast Python SDK and great expectations:

!pip install 'feast[ge]'

1. Dataset preparation (Optional)

You can skip this step if you don't have GCP account. Please use parquet files that are coming with this tutorial instead

!pip install google-cloud-bigquery

import pyarrow.parquet

from google.cloud.bigquery import Client

bq_client = Client(project='kf-feast')

Running some basic aggregations while pulling data from BigQuery. Grouping by taxi_id and day:

data_query = """SELECT
    taxi_id,
    TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(trip_start_timestamp, DAY) as day,
    SUM(trip_miles) as total_miles_travelled,
    SUM(trip_seconds) as total_trip_seconds,
    SUM(fare) as total_earned,
    COUNT(*) as trip_count
FROM `bigquery-public-data.chicago_taxi_trips.taxi_trips`
WHERE
    trip_miles > 0 AND trip_seconds > 60 AND
    trip_start_timestamp BETWEEN '2019-01-01' and '2020-12-31' AND
    trip_total < 1000
GROUP BY taxi_id, TIMESTAMP_TRUNC(trip_start_timestamp, DAY)"""

driver_stats_table = bq_client.query(data_query).to_arrow()

# Storing resulting dataset into parquet file
pyarrow.parquet.write_table(driver_stats_table, "trips_stats.parquet")

def entities_query(year):
    return f"""SELECT
    distinct taxi_id
FROM `bigquery-public-data.chicago_taxi_trips.taxi_trips`
WHERE
    trip_miles > 0 AND trip_seconds > 0 AND
    trip_start_timestamp BETWEEN '{year}-01-01' and '{year}-12-31'
"""

entities_2019_table = bq_client.query(entities_query(2019)).to_arrow()

# Storing entities (taxi ids) into parquet file
pyarrow.parquet.write_table(entities_2019_table, "entities.parquet")

2. Declaring features

import pyarrow.parquet
import pandas as pd

from feast import FeatureView, Entity, FeatureStore, Field
from feast.types import Float64, Int64
from feast.value_type import ValueType
from feast.data_format import ParquetFormat
from feast.on_demand_feature_view import on_demand_feature_view
from feast.infra.offline_stores.file_source import FileSource
from feast.infra.offline_stores.file import SavedDatasetFileStorage
from datetime import timedelta

batch_source = FileSource(
    timestamp_field="day",
    path="trips_stats.parquet",  # using parquet file that we created on previous step
    file_format=ParquetFormat()
)

taxi_entity = Entity(name='taxi', join_keys=['taxi_id'])

trips_stats_fv = FeatureView(
    name='trip_stats',
    entities=['taxi'],
    features=[
        Field(name="total_miles_travelled", dtype=Float64),
        Field(name="total_trip_seconds", dtype=Float64),
        Field(name="total_earned", dtype=Float64),
        Field(name="trip_count", dtype=Int64),

    ],
    ttl=timedelta(seconds=86400),
    source=batch_source,
)

Read more about feature views in Feast docs

@on_demand_feature_view(
    schema=[
        Field("avg_fare", Float64),
        Field("avg_speed", Float64),
        Field("avg_trip_seconds", Float64),
        Field("earned_per_hour", Float64),
    ],
    sources={
        "stats": trips_stats_fv
    }
)
def on_demand_stats(inp):
    out = pd.DataFrame()
    out["avg_fare"] = inp["total_earned"] / inp["trip_count"]
    out["avg_speed"] = 3600 * inp["total_miles_travelled"] / inp["total_trip_seconds"]
    out["avg_trip_seconds"] = inp["total_trip_seconds"] / inp["trip_count"]
    out["earned_per_hour"] = 3600 * inp["total_earned"] / inp["total_trip_seconds"]
    return out

Read more about on demand feature views here

store = FeatureStore(".")  # using feature_store.yaml that stored in the same directory

store.apply([taxi_entity, trips_stats_fv, on_demand_stats])  # writing to the registry

3. Generating training (reference) dataset

taxi_ids = pyarrow.parquet.read_table("entities.parquet").to_pandas()

Generating range of timestamps with daily frequency:

timestamps = pd.DataFrame()
timestamps["event_timestamp"] = pd.date_range("2019-06-01", "2019-07-01", freq='D')

Cross merge (aka relation multiplication) produces entity dataframe with each taxi_id repeated for each timestamp:

entity_df = pd.merge(taxi_ids, timestamps, how='cross')
entity_df

156984 rows × 2 columns

Retrieving historical features for resulting entity dataframe and persisting output as a saved dataset:

job = store.get_historical_features(
    entity_df=entity_df,
    features=[
        "trip_stats:total_miles_travelled",
        "trip_stats:total_trip_seconds",
        "trip_stats:total_earned",
        "trip_stats:trip_count",
        "on_demand_stats:avg_fare",
        "on_demand_stats:avg_trip_seconds",
        "on_demand_stats:avg_speed",
        "on_demand_stats:earned_per_hour",
    ]
)

store.create_saved_dataset(
    from_=job,
    name='my_training_ds',
    storage=SavedDatasetFileStorage(path='my_training_ds.parquet')
)

<SavedDataset(name = my_training_ds, features = ['trip_stats:total_miles_travelled', 'trip_stats:total_trip_seconds', 'trip_stats:total_earned', 'trip_stats:trip_count', 'on_demand_stats:avg_fare', 'on_demand_stats:avg_trip_seconds', 'on_demand_stats:avg_speed', 'on_demand_stats:earned_per_hour'], join_keys = ['taxi_id'], storage = <feast.infra.offline_stores.file_source.SavedDatasetFileStorage object at 0x1276e7950>, full_feature_names = False, tags = {}, _retrieval_job = <feast.infra.offline_stores.file.FileRetrievalJob object at 0x12716fed0>, min_event_timestamp = 2019-06-01 00:00:00, max_event_timestamp = 2019-07-01 00:00:00)>

4. Developing dataset profiler

Dataset profiler is a function that accepts dataset and generates set of its characteristics. This charasteristics will be then used to evaluate (validate) next datasets.

Important: datasets are not compared to each other! Feast use a reference dataset and a profiler function to generate a reference profile. This profile will be then used during validation of the tested dataset.

import numpy as np

from feast.dqm.profilers.ge_profiler import ge_profiler

from great_expectations.core.expectation_suite import ExpectationSuite
from great_expectations.dataset import PandasDataset

Loading saved dataset first and exploring the data:

ds = store.get_saved_dataset('my_training_ds')
ds.to_df()

156984 rows × 10 columns

Feast uses Great Expectations as a validation engine and ExpectationSuite as a dataset's profile. Hence, we need to develop a function that will generate ExpectationSuite. This function will receive instance of PandasDataset (wrapper around pandas.DataFrame) so we can utilize both Pandas DataFrame API and some helper functions from PandasDataset during profiling.

DELTA = 0.1  # controlling allowed window in fraction of the value on scale [0, 1]

@ge_profiler
def stats_profiler(ds: PandasDataset) -> ExpectationSuite:
    # simple checks on data consistency
    ds.expect_column_values_to_be_between(
        "avg_speed",
        min_value=0,
        max_value=60,
        mostly=0.99  # allow some outliers
    )

    ds.expect_column_values_to_be_between(
        "total_miles_travelled",
        min_value=0,
        max_value=500,
        mostly=0.99  # allow some outliers
    )

    # expectation of means based on observed values
    observed_mean = ds.trip_count.mean()
    ds.expect_column_mean_to_be_between("trip_count",
                                        min_value=observed_mean * (1 - DELTA),
                                        max_value=observed_mean * (1 + DELTA))

    observed_mean = ds.earned_per_hour.mean()
    ds.expect_column_mean_to_be_between("earned_per_hour",
                                        min_value=observed_mean * (1 - DELTA),
                                        max_value=observed_mean * (1 + DELTA))


    # expectation of quantiles
    qs = [0.5, 0.75, 0.9, 0.95]
    observed_quantiles = ds.avg_fare.quantile(qs)

    ds.expect_column_quantile_values_to_be_between(
        "avg_fare",
        quantile_ranges={
            "quantiles": qs,
            "value_ranges": [[None, max_value] for max_value in observed_quantiles]
        })

    return ds.get_expectation_suite()

Testing our profiler function:

ds.get_profile(profiler=stats_profiler)