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

• We welcome contribution to all items in the roadmap!

• Have questions about the roadmap? Go to the Slack channel to ask on #feast-development.

• Data Sources

  • Snowflake source

  • Redshift source

  • BigQuery source

  • Parquet file source

  • Azure Synapse + Azure SQL source (contrib plugin)

  • Hive (community plugin)

  • Postgres (contrib plugin)

  • Spark (contrib plugin)

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

• Offline Stores

  • Snowflake

  • Redshift

  • BigQuery

  • Azure Synapse + Azure SQL (contrib plugin)

  • Hive (community plugin)

  • Postgres (contrib plugin)

  • Trino (contrib plugin)

  • Spark (contrib plugin)

  • In-memory / Pandas

  • Custom offline store support

• Online Stores

  • Snowflake

  • DynamoDB

  • Redis

  • Datastore

  • Bigtable

  • SQLite

  • Azure Cache for Redis (community plugin)

  • Postgres (contrib plugin)

  • Cassandra / AstraDB (contrib plugin)

  • Custom online store support

• Feature Engineering

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

  • Streaming Transformations (Alpha release. See RFC)

  • Batch transformation (In progress. See RFC)

• Streaming

  • Custom streaming ingestion job support

  • Push based streaming data ingestion to online store

  • Push based streaming data ingestion to offline store

• Deployments

  • AWS Lambda (Alpha release. See RFC)

  • Kubernetes (See guide)

• Feature Serving

  • Python Client

  • Python feature server

  • Java feature server (alpha)

  • Go feature server (alpha)

• Data Quality Management (See RFC)

  • Data profiling and validation (Great Expectations)

• 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)

  • DataHub integration (see DataHub Feast docs)

  • Feast Web UI (Beta release. See docs)

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. Ingest batch features ("materialization") and streaming features (via a Push API) into the online store.

4. Read the latest features from the offline store for batch scoring

5. Read the latest features from the online store for real-time inference.

6. Explore the (experimental) Feast UI

Overview

In this tutorial, we'll use Feast 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.

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 data sources.

   • 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 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).

   • (Experimental) Feast enables light-weight feature transformations so users can re-use transformation logic across online / offline use cases and across models.

Step 1: Install Feast

Install the Feast SDK and CLI using pip:

• In this tutorial, we focus on a local deployment. For a more in-depth guide on how to use Feast with Snowflake / GCP / AWS deployments, see Running Feast with Snowflake/GCP/AWS

pip install feast

Step 2: Create a feature repository

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

feast init my_project
cd my_project/feature_repo

Creating a new Feast repository in /home/Jovyan/my_project.

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

• data/ contains raw demo parquet data

• example_repo.py contains demo feature definitions

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

• test_workflow.py showcases how to run all key Feast commands, including defining, retrieving, and pushing features. You can run this with python test_workflow.py.

project: my_project
# By default, the registry is a file (but can be turned into a more scalable SQL-backed registry)
registry: data/registry.db
# The provider primarily specifies default offline / online stores & storing the registry in a given cloud
provider: local
online_store:
  type: sqlite
  path: data/online_store.db
entity_key_serialization_version: 2

# This is an example feature definition file

from datetime import timedelta

import pandas as pd

from feast import (
    Entity,
    FeatureService,
    FeatureView,
    Field,
    FileSource,
    PushSource,
    RequestSource,
)
from feast.on_demand_feature_view import on_demand_feature_view
from feast.types import Float32, Float64, Int64

# Define an entity for the driver. You can think of entity as a primary key used to
# fetch features.
driver = Entity(name="driver", join_keys=["driver_id"])

# Read data from parquet files. Parquet is convenient for local development mode. For
# production, you can use your favorite DWH, such as BigQuery. See Feast documentation
# for more info.
driver_stats_source = FileSource(
    name="driver_hourly_stats_source",
    path="%PARQUET_PATH%",
    timestamp_field="event_timestamp",
    created_timestamp_column="created",
)

# Our parquet files contain sample data that includes a driver_id column, timestamps and
# three feature column. Here we define a Feature View that will allow us to serve this
# data to our model online.
driver_stats_fv = FeatureView(
    # The unique name of this feature view. Two feature views in a single
    # project cannot have the same name
    name="driver_hourly_stats",
    entities=[driver],
    ttl=timedelta(days=1),
    # The list of features defined below act as a schema to both define features
    # for both materialization of features into a store, and are used as references
    # during retrieval for building a training dataset or serving features
    schema=[
        Field(name="conv_rate", dtype=Float32),
        Field(name="acc_rate", dtype=Float32),
        Field(name="avg_daily_trips", dtype=Int64),
    ],
    online=True,
    source=driver_stats_source,
    # Tags are user defined key/value pairs that are attached to each
    # feature view
    tags={"team": "driver_performance"},
)

# Defines a way to push data (to be available offline, online or both) into Feast.
driver_stats_push_source = PushSource(
    name="driver_stats_push_source",
    batch_source=driver_stats_source,
)

# Define a request data source which encodes features / information only
# available at request time (e.g. part of the user initiated HTTP request)
input_request = RequestSource(
    name="vals_to_add",
    schema=[
        Field(name="val_to_add", dtype=Int64),
        Field(name="val_to_add_2", dtype=Int64),
    ],
)


# Define an on demand feature view which can generate new features based on
# existing feature views and RequestSource features
@on_demand_feature_view(
    sources=[driver_stats_fv, input_request],
    schema=[
        Field(name="conv_rate_plus_val1", dtype=Float64),
        Field(name="conv_rate_plus_val2", dtype=Float64),
    ],
)
def transformed_conv_rate(inputs: pd.DataFrame) -> pd.DataFrame:
    df = pd.DataFrame()
    df["conv_rate_plus_val1"] = inputs["conv_rate"] + inputs["val_to_add"]
    df["conv_rate_plus_val2"] = inputs["conv_rate"] + inputs["val_to_add_2"]
    return df


# This groups features into a model version
driver_activity_v1 = FeatureService(
    name="driver_activity_v1",
    features=[
        driver_stats_fv[["conv_rate"]],  # Sub-selects a feature from a feature view
        transformed_conv_rate,  # Selects all features from the feature view
    ],
)
driver_activity_v2 = FeatureService(
    name="driver_activity_v2", features=[driver_stats_fv, transformed_conv_rate]
)

The feature_store.yaml file configures the key overall architecture of the feature store.

The provider value sets default offline and online stores.

• The offline store provides the compute layer to process historical data (for generating training data & feature values for serving).

• The online store is a low latency store of the latest feature values (for powering real-time inference).

Valid values for provider in feature_store.yaml are:

• local: use a SQL registry or local file registry. By default, use a file / Dask based offline store + SQLite online store

• gcp: use a SQL registry or GCS file registry. By default, use BigQuery (offline store) + Google Cloud Datastore (online store)

• aws: use a SQL registry or S3 file registry. By default, use Redshift (offline store) + DynamoDB (online store)

Note that there are many other offline / online stores Feast works with, including Spark, Azure, Hive, Trino, and PostgreSQL via community plugins. See Third party integrations for all supported data sources.

A custom setup can also be made by following Customizing Feast.

Inspecting the raw data

The raw feature data we have in this demo is stored in a local parquet file. The dataset captures hourly stats of a driver in a ride-sharing app.

import pandas as pd
pd.read_parquet("data/driver_stats.parquet")

Step 3: Run sample workflow

There's an included test_workflow.py file which runs through a full sample workflow:

1. Register feature definitions through feast apply

2. Generate a training dataset (using get_historical_features)

3. Generate features for batch scoring (using get_historical_features)

4. Ingest batch features into an online store (using materialize_incremental)

5. Fetch online features to power real time inference (using get_online_features)

6. Ingest streaming features into offline / online stores (using push)

7. Verify online features are updated / fresher

We'll walk through some snippets of code below and explain

Step 3a: 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_repo.py and sets up SQLite online store tables. Note that we had specified SQLite as the default online store by configuring online_store in feature_store.yaml.

feast apply

Created entity driver
Created feature view driver_hourly_stats
Created on demand feature view transformed_conv_rate
Created feature service driver_activity_v1
Created feature service driver_activity_v2

Created sqlite table my_project_driver_hourly_stats

Step 3b: Generating training data or powering batch scoring models

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). Feast can help generate the features that map to these labels.

Feast needs a list of entities (e.g. driver ids) and timestamps. Feast will intelligently join relevant tables to create the relevant feature vectors. There are two ways to generate this list:

1. The user can query that table of labels with timestamps and pass that into Feast as an entity dataframe for training data generation.

2. The user can also query that table with a SQL query which pulls entities. See the documentation on feature retrieval for details

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

Generating training data

from datetime import datetime
import pandas as pd

from feast import FeatureStore

# Note: see https://docs.feast.dev/getting-started/concepts/feature-retrieval for 
# more details on how to retrieve for all entities in the offline store instead
entity_df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(
    {
        # entity's join key -> entity values
        "driver_id": [1001, 1002, 1003],
        # "event_timestamp" (reserved key) -> timestamps
        "event_timestamp": [
            datetime(2021, 4, 12, 10, 59, 42),
            datetime(2021, 4, 12, 8, 12, 10),
            datetime(2021, 4, 12, 16, 40, 26),
        ],
        # (optional) label name -> label values. Feast does not process these
        "label_driver_reported_satisfaction": [1, 5, 3],
        # values we're using for an on-demand transformation
        "val_to_add": [1, 2, 3],
        "val_to_add_2": [10, 20, 30],
    }
)

store = FeatureStore(repo_path=".")

training_df = store.get_historical_features(
    entity_df=entity_df,
    features=[
        "driver_hourly_stats:conv_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:acc_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:avg_daily_trips",
        "transformed_conv_rate:conv_rate_plus_val1",
        "transformed_conv_rate:conv_rate_plus_val2",
    ],
).to_df()

print("----- Feature schema -----\n")
print(training_df.info())

print()
print("----- Example features -----\n")
print(training_df.head())

----- Feature schema -----

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 3 entries, 0 to 2
Data columns (total 6 columns):
 #   Column                              Non-Null Count  Dtype
---  ------                              --------------  -----
 0   event_timestamp                     3 non-null      datetime64[ns, UTC]
 1   driver_id                           3 non-null      int64
 2   label_driver_reported_satisfaction  3 non-null      int64
 3   conv_rate                           3 non-null      float32
 4   acc_rate                            3 non-null      float32
 5   avg_daily_trips                     3 non-null      int32
dtypes: datetime64[ns, UTC](1), float32(2), int32(1), int64(2)
memory usage: 132.0 bytes
None

----- Example features -----

                   event_timestamp  driver_id  ...  acc_rate  avg_daily_trips
0 2021-08-23 15:12:55.489091+00:00       1003  ...  0.077863              741
1 2021-08-23 15:49:55.489089+00:00       1002  ...  0.074327              113
2 2021-08-23 16:14:55.489075+00:00       1001  ...  0.105046              347

[3 rows x 6 columns]

Run offline inference (batch scoring)

To power a batch model, we primarily need to generate features with the get_historical_features call, but using the current timestamp

entity_df["event_timestamp"] = pd.to_datetime("now", utc=True)
training_df = store.get_historical_features(
    entity_df=entity_df,
    features=[
        "driver_hourly_stats:conv_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:acc_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:avg_daily_trips",
        "transformed_conv_rate:conv_rate_plus_val1",
        "transformed_conv_rate:conv_rate_plus_val2",
    ],
).to_df()

print("\n----- Example features -----\n")
print(training_df.head())

----- Example features -----

   driver_id                  event_timestamp  ... acc_rate  avg_daily_trips  conv_rate_plus_val1  
0       1001 2022-08-08 18:22:06.555018+00:00  ... 0.864639              359             1.663844
1       1002 2022-08-08 18:22:06.555018+00:00  ... 0.695982              311             2.151189 
2       1003 2022-08-08 18:22:06.555018+00:00  ... 0.949191              789             3.769165 

Step 3c: Ingest batch 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).

CURRENT_TIME=$(date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
feast materialize-incremental $CURRENT_TIME

Materializing 1 feature views to 2021-08-23 16:25:46+00:00 into the sqlite online
store.

driver_hourly_stats from 2021-08-22 16:25:47+00:00 to 2021-08-23 16:25:46+00:00:
100%|████████████████████████████████████████████| 5/5 [00:00<00:00, 592.05it/s]

Step 3d: 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.

from pprint import pprint
from feast import FeatureStore

store = FeatureStore(repo_path=".")

feature_vector = store.get_online_features(
    features=[
        "driver_hourly_stats:conv_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:acc_rate",
        "driver_hourly_stats:avg_daily_trips",
    ],
    entity_rows=[
        # {join_key: entity_value}
        {"driver_id": 1004},
        {"driver_id": 1005},
    ],
).to_dict()

pprint(feature_vector)

{
 'acc_rate': [0.5732735991477966, 0.7828438878059387],
 'avg_daily_trips': [33, 984],
 'conv_rate': [0.15498852729797363, 0.6263588070869446],
 'driver_id': [1004, 1005]
}

Step 3e: Using a feature service to fetch online features instead.

You can also use feature services to manage multiple features, and decouple feature view definitions and the features needed by end applications. The feature store can also be used to fetch either online or historical features using the same API below. More information can be found here.

The driver_activity_v1 feature service pulls all features from the driver_hourly_stats feature view:

from feast import FeatureService
driver_stats_fs = FeatureService(
    name="driver_activity_v1", features=[driver_hourly_stats_view]
)

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

feature_service = feature_store.get_feature_service("driver_activity_v1")
feature_vector = feature_store.get_online_features(
    features=feature_service,
    entity_rows=[
        # {join_key: entity_value}
        {"driver_id": 1004},
        {"driver_id": 1005},
    ],
).to_dict()
pprint(feature_vector)

{
 'acc_rate': [0.5732735991477966, 0.7828438878059387],
 'avg_daily_trips': [33, 984],
 'conv_rate': [0.15498852729797363, 0.6263588070869446],
 'driver_id': [1004, 1005]
}

Step 4: Browse your features with the Web UI (experimental)

View all registered features, data sources, entities, and feature services with the Web UI.

One of the ways to view this is with the feast ui command.

feast ui

INFO:     Started server process [66664]
08/17/2022 01:25:49 PM uvicorn.error INFO: Started server process [66664]
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.
08/17/2022 01:25:49 PM uvicorn.error INFO: Waiting for application startup.
INFO:     Application startup complete.
08/17/2022 01:25:49 PM uvicorn.error INFO: Application startup complete.
INFO:     Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8888 (Press CTRL+C to quit)
08/17/2022 01:25:49 PM uvicorn.error INFO: Uvicorn running on http://0.0.0.0:8888 (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Step 5: Re-examine test_workflow.py

Take a look at test_workflow.py again. It showcases many sample flows on how to interact with Feast. You'll see these show up in the upcoming concepts + architecture + tutorial pages as well.

Next steps

• Join the email newsletter to get new updates on Feast / feature stores.

• Read the Concepts page to understand the Feast data model.

• Read the Architecture page.

• Check out our Tutorials section for more examples on how to use Feast.

• Follow our Running Feast with Snowflake/GCP/AWS guide for a more in-depth tutorial on using Feast.

• Join other Feast users and contributors in Slack and become part of the community!

Feast project structure

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.

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).

Data ingestion

For offline use cases that only rely on batch data, Feast does not need to ingest data and can query your existing data (leveraging a compute engine, whether it be a data warehouse or (experimental) Spark / Trino). Feast can help manage pushing streaming features to a batch source to make features available for training.

For online use cases, Feast supports ingesting features from batch sources to make them available online (through a process called materialization), and pushing streaming features to make them available both offline / online. We explore this more in the next concept page (Data ingestion)

Feature registration and retrieval

Features are registered as code in a version controlled repository, and tie to data sources + model versions via the concepts of entities, feature views, and feature services. We explore these concepts more in the upcoming concept pages. These features are then stored in a registry, which can be accessed across users and services. The features can then be retrieved via SDK API methods or via a deployed feature server which exposes endpoints to query for online features (to power real time models).

Feast supports several patterns of feature retrieval.

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.

The entity name is used to uniquely identify the entity (for example to show in the experimental Web UI). The join key is used to identify the physical primary key on which feature values should be joined together to be retrieved during feature retrieval.

Entities are used by Feast in many contexts, as we explore below:

Use case #1: Defining and storing features

Feast's primary object for defining features is a feature view, which is a collection of features. Feature views map to 0 or more entities, since a feature can be associated with:

• zero entities (e.g. a global feature like num_daily_global_transactions)

• one entity (e.g. a user feature like user_age or last_5_bought_items)

• multiple entities, aka a composite key (e.g. a user + merchant category feature like num_user_purchases_in_merchant_category)

Feast refers to this collection of entities for a feature view as an entity key.

Entities should be reused across feature views. This helps with discovery of features, since it enables data scientists understand how other teams build features for the entity they are most interested in.

Feast will use the feature view concept to then define the schema of groups of features in a low-latency online store.

Use case #2: Retrieving features

At serving time, users specify entity key(s) to fetch the latest feature values which can power real-time model prediction (e.g. a fraud detection model that needs to fetch the latest transaction user's features to make a prediction).

Data source

A data source in Feast refers to raw underlying data that users own (e.g. in a table in BigQuery). Feast does not manage any of the raw underlying data but instead, is in charge of loading this data and performing different operations on the data to retrieve or serve features.

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 materialize features into an online store.

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

Feast supports primarily time-stamped tabular data as data sources. There are many kinds of possible data sources:

• Batch data sources: ideally, these live in data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift), but can be in data lakes (S3, GCS, etc). Feast supports ingesting and querying data across both.

• Stream data sources: Feast does not have native streaming integrations. It does however facilitate making streaming features available in different environments. There are two kinds of sources:

  • Push sources allow users to push features into Feast, and make it available for training / batch scoring ("offline"), for realtime feature serving ("online") or both.

  • [Alpha] Stream sources allow users to register metadata from Kafka or Kinesis sources. The onus is on the user to ingest from these sources, though Feast provides some limited helper methods to ingest directly from Kafka / Kinesis topics.

Batch data ingestion

Ingesting from batch sources is only necessary to power real-time models. This is done through materialization. Under the hood, Feast manages an offline store (to scalably generate training data from batch sources) and an online store (to provide low-latency access to features for real-time models).

A key command to use in Feast is the materialize_incremental command, which fetches the latest values for all entities in the batch source and ingests these values into the online store.

Materialization can be called programmatically or through the CLI:

Batch data schema inference

If the schema parameter is not specified when defining a data source, Feast attempts to infer the schema of the data source during feast apply. The way it does this depends on the implementation of the offline store. For the offline stores that ship with Feast out of the box this inference is performed by inspecting the schema of the table in the cloud data warehouse, or if a query is provided to the source, by running the query with a LIMIT clause and inspecting the result.

Stream data ingestion

Ingesting from stream sources happens either via a Push API or via a contrib processor that leverages an existing Spark context.

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 specified.

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.

Links & Resources

• : Find the complete Feast codebase on GitHub.

  • : See the governance model of Feast, including who the maintainers are and how decisions are made.

• : Feel free to ask questions or say hello! This is the main place where maintainers and contributors brainstorm and where users ask questions or discuss best practices.

  • Feast users should join #feast-general or #feast-beginners to ask questions

  • Feast developers / contributors should join #feast-development

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

  • Feast users should join group by clicking .

  • Feast developers / contributors should join group by clicking .

• : Includes community calls and design meetings.

• : 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.

• : 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).

Community Calls

General community call (biweekly)

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

Frequency (every 2 weeks)

• Tuesday 10:00 am to 10:30 am PST

Links

Developers call (biweekly)

We also have a #feast-development community call every two weeks, where we discuss contributions + brainstorm best practices.

Frequency (every 2 weeks)

• Tuesday 8:00 am to 8:30 am PST

Links

Feature views

A feature view is an object that represents a logical group of time-series feature data as it is found in a . Depending on the kind of feature view, it may contain some lightweight (experimental) feature transformations (see ).

Feature views consist of:

• a

• zero or more

  • If the features are not related to a specific object, the feature view might not have entities; see below.

• a name to uniquely identify this feature view in the project.

• (optional, but recommended) a schema specifying one or more (without this, Feast will infer the schema by reading from the data source)

• (optional, but recommended) metadata (for example, description, or other free-form metadata via tags)

• (optional) a TTL, which limits how far back Feast will look when generating historical datasets

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.

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.

• 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 timestamps are needed for this feature view).

Feature inferencing

If the schema parameter is not specified in the creation of the feature view, Feast will infer the features during feast apply by creating a Field 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.

Field

A field or 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. Supported types for fields in Feast can be found in sdk/python/feast/types.py.

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

[Alpha] On demand feature views

On demand feature views allows data scientists 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 the historical retrieval and online retrieval paths.

Currently, these transformations are executed locally. This is fine for online serving, but does not scale well to offline retrieval.

Why use on demand feature views?

This enables data scientists to easily impact the online feature retrieval path. For example, a data scientist could

1. Call get_historical_features to generate a training dataframe

2. Iterate in notebook on feature engineering in Pandas

3. Copy transformation logic into on demand feature views and commit to a dev branch of the feature repository

4. Verify with get_historical_features (on a small dataset) that the transformation gives expected output over historical data

5. Verify with get_online_features on dev branch that the transformation correctly outputs online features

6. Submit a pull request to the staging / prod branches which impact production traffic

[Alpha] Stream feature views

A stream feature view is an extension of a normal feature view. The primary difference is that stream feature views have both stream and batch data sources, whereas a normal feature view only has a batch data source.

Stream feature views should be used instead of normal feature views when there are stream data sources (e.g. Kafka and Kinesis) available to provide fresh features in an online setting. Here is an example definition of a stream feature view with an attached transformation:

What is Feast?

Feast (Feature Store) is a customizable operational data system that re-uses existing infrastructure to manage and serve machine learning features to realtime models.

Feast allows ML platform teams to:

• Make features consistently available for training and serving by managing an offline store (to process historical data for scale-out batch scoring or model training), a low-latency online store (to power real-time prediction), and a battle-tested feature server (to serve pre-computed features online).

• Avoid data leakage by generating point-in-time correct feature sets so data scientists can focus on feature engineering rather than debugging error-prone dataset joining logic. This ensure that future feature values do not leak to models during training.

• Decouple ML from data infrastructure by providing a single data access layer that abstracts feature storage from feature retrieval, ensuring models remain portable as you move from training models to serving models, from batch models to realtime models, and from one data infra system to another.

Who is Feast for?

Feast helps ML platform teams with DevOps experience productionize real-time models. Feast can also help these teams build towards a feature platform that improves collaboration between engineers and data scientists.

Feast is likely not the right tool if you

• are in an organization that’s just getting started with ML and is not yet sure what the business impact of ML is

• rely primarily on unstructured data

• need very low latency feature retrieval (e.g. p99 feature retrieval << 10ms)

• have a small team to support a large number of use cases

What Feast is not?

Feast is not

• a 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.

• a database: Feast is not a database, but helps manage data stored in other systems (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, DynamoDB, Redis) to make features consistently available at training / serving time

Feast does not fully solve

Example use cases

Many companies have used Feast to power real-world ML use cases such as:

• Personalizing online recommendations by leveraging pre-computed historical user or item features.

• Online fraud detection, using features that compare against (pre-computed) historical transaction patterns

• Churn prediction (an offline model), generating feature values for all users at a fixed cadence in batch

• Credit scoring, using pre-computed historical features to compute probability of default

How can I get started?

Explore the following resources to get started with Feast:

Overview

Generally, Feast supports several patterns of feature retrieval:

1. Training data generation (via feature_store.get_historical_features(...))

2. Offline feature retrieval for batch scoring (via feature_store.get_historical_features(...))

3. Online feature retrieval for real-time model predictions

   • via the SDK: feature_store.get_online_features(...)

   • via deployed feature server endpoints: requests.post('http://localhost:6566/get-online-features', data=json.dumps(online_request))

Each of these retrieval mechanisms accept:

• some way of specifying entities (to fetch features for)

• some way to specify the features to fetch (either via , which group features needed for a model version, or )

Before beginning, you need to instantiate a local FeatureStore object that knows how to parse the registry (see )

For code examples of how the below work, inspect the generated repository from feast init -t [YOUR TEMPLATE] (gcp, snowflake, and aws are the most fully fleshed).

Concepts

Before diving into how to retrieve features, we need to understand some high level concepts in Feast.

Feature Services

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 for batch scoring from the offline store (e.g. with an entity dataframe where all timestamps are now())

• Retrieval of features from the online store for online inference (with smaller batch sizes). The features retrieved from the online store may also belong to multiple feature views.

Feature services enable referencing all or some features from a feature view.

Retrieving from the online store with a feature service

Retrieving from the offline store with a feature service

Feature References

This mechanism of retrieving features is only recommended as you're experimenting. Once you want to launch experiments or serve models, feature services are recommended.

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:

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.

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.

Retrieving historical features (for training data or batch scoring)

Feast abstracts away point-in-time join complexities with the get_historical_features API.

We go through the major steps, and also show example code. Note that the quickstart templates generally have end-to-end working examples for all these cases.

Step 1: Specifying Features

Feast accepts either:

Example: querying a feature service (recommended)

Example: querying a list of feature references

Step 2: Specifying Entities

Feast accepts either a Pandas dataframe as the entity dataframe (including entity keys and timestamps) or a SQL query to generate the entities.

Both approaches must specify the full entity key needed as well as the timestamps. Feast then joins features onto this dataframe.

Example: entity dataframe for generating training data

Example: entity SQL query for generating training data

You can also pass a SQL string to generate the above dataframe. This is useful for getting all entities in a timeframe from some data source.

Retrieving online features (for model inference)

Feast will ensure the latest feature values for registered features are available. At retrieval time, you need to supply a list of entities and the corresponding features to be retrieved. Similar to get_historical_features, we recommend using feature services as a mechanism for grouping features in a model version.

Note: unlike get_historical_features, the entity_rows do not need timestamps since you only want one feature value per entity key.

There are several options for retrieving online features: through the SDK, or through a feature server

An offline store is an interface for working with historical time-series feature values that are stored in data sources. The OfflineStore interface has several different implementations, such as the BigQueryOfflineStore, each of which is backed by a different storage and compute engine. For more details on which offline stores are supported, please see Offline Stores.

Offline stores are primarily used for two reasons:

1. Building training datasets from time-series features.

2. Materializing (loading) features into an online store to serve those features at low-latency in a production setting.

Offline stores are configured through the feature_store.yaml. When building training datasets or materializing features into an online store, Feast will use the configured offline store with your configured data sources to execute the necessary data operations.

Only a single offline store can be used at a time. Moreover, offline stores are not compatible with all data sources; for example, the BigQuery offline store cannot be used to query a file-based data source.

Please see Push Source for more details on how to push features directly to the offline store in your feature store.

Feast uses a registry to store all applied Feast objects (e.g. Feature views, entities, etc). The registry exposes methods to apply, list, retrieve and delete these objects, and is an abstraction with multiple implementations.

Options for registry implementations

File-based registry

By default, Feast uses a file-based registry implementation, which stores the protobuf representation of the registry as a serialized file. This registry file can be stored in a local file system, or in cloud storage (in, say, S3 or GCS, or Azure).

The quickstart guides that use feast init will use a registry on a local file system. To allow Feast to configure a remote file registry, you need to create a GCS / S3 bucket that Feast can understand:

project: feast_demo_aws
provider: aws
registry: 
  path: s3://[YOUR BUCKET YOU CREATED]/registry.pb
  cache_ttl_seconds: 60
online_store: null
offline_store:
  type: file

project: feast_demo_gcp
provider: gcp
registry:
  path: gs://[YOUR BUCKET YOU CREATED]/registry.pb
  cache_ttl_seconds: 60
online_store: null
offline_store:
  type: file

However, there are inherent limitations with a file-based registry, since changing a single field in the registry requires re-writing the whole registry file. With multiple concurrent writers, this presents a risk of data loss, or bottlenecks writes to the registry since all changes have to be serialized (e.g. when running materialization for multiple feature views or time ranges concurrently).

SQL Registry

Alternatively, a SQL Registry can be used for a more scalable registry.

The configuration roughly looks like:

project: <your project name>
provider: <provider name>
online_store: redis
offline_store: file
registry:
    registry_type: sql
    path: postgresql://postgres:mysecretpassword@127.0.0.1:55001/feast
    cache_ttl_seconds: 60

This supports any SQLAlchemy compatible database as a backend. The exact schema can be seen in sql.py

Updating the registry

We recommend users store their Feast feature definitions in a version controlled repository, which then via CI/CD automatically stays synced with the registry. Users will often also want multiple registries to correspond to different environments (e.g. dev vs staging vs prod), with staging and production registries with locked down write access since they can impact real user traffic. See Running Feast in Production for details on how to set this up.

Accessing the registry from clients

Users can specify the registry through a feature_store.yaml config file, or programmatically. We often see teams preferring the programmatic approach because it makes notebook driven development very easy:

Option 1: programmatically specifying the registry

repo_config = RepoConfig(
    registry=RegistryConfig(path="gs://feast-test-gcs-bucket/registry.pb"),
    project="feast_demo_gcp",
    provider="gcp",
    offline_store="file",  # Could also be the OfflineStoreConfig e.g. FileOfflineStoreConfig
    online_store="null",  # Could also be the OnlineStoreConfig e.g. RedisOnlineStoreConfig
)
store = FeatureStore(config=repo_config)

Option 2: specifying the registry in the project's feature_store.yaml file

project: feast_demo_aws
provider: aws
registry: s3://feast-test-s3-bucket/registry.pb
online_store: null
offline_store:
  type: file

Instantiating a FeatureStore object can then point to this:

store = FeatureStore(repo_path=".")

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 four 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

• [Alpha] Azure: Used as centralized backend for storing the registry on Azure Blob storage.

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:

fs = FeatureStore("my_feature_repo/")
print(fs.list_feature_views())

Or retrieving a specific feature view:

fs = FeatureStore("my_feature_repo/")
fv = fs.get_feature_view(“my_fv1”)

Feast datasets allow for conveniently saving dataframes that include both features and entities to be subsequently used for data analysis and model training. Data Quality Monitoring 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 offline store.

Dataset can be created from:

1. Results of historical retrieval

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

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

Creating a 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 the provided retrieval job (by calling .persist() on it) to store the data using the specified storage behind the scenes. Storage type must be the same as the globally configured offline store (e.g it's impossible to persist data to a different offline source). create_saved_dataset will also create a SavedDataset object with all of the related metadata and will write this object to the registry.

from feast import FeatureStore
from feast.infra.offline_stores.bigquery_source import SavedDatasetBigQueryStorage

store = FeatureStore()

historical_job = store.get_historical_features(
    features=["driver:avg_trip"],
    entity_df=...,
)

dataset = store.create_saved_dataset(
    from_=historical_job,
    name='my_training_dataset',
    storage=SavedDatasetBigQueryStorage(table_ref='<gcp-project>.<gcp-dataset>.my_training_dataset'),
    tags={'author': 'oleksii'}
)

dataset.to_df()

Saved dataset can be retrieved later using the get_saved_dataset method in the feature store:

dataset = store.get_saved_dataset('my_training_dataset')
dataset.to_df()

Check out our tutorial on validating historical features to see how this concept can be applied in a real-world use case.

Functionality

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

• Create Stream Features: Stream features are created from streaming services such as Kafka or Kinesis, and can be pushed directly into Feast via the Push API.

• 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 that can be used for training models.

• 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.

• Stream Processor: The Stream Processor can be used to ingest feature data from streams and write it into the online or offline stores. Currently, there's an experimental Spark processor that's able to consume data from Kafka.

• Batch Materialization Engine: The Batch Materialization Engine component launches a process which loads data into the online store from the offline store. By default, Feast uses a local in-process engine implementation to materialize data. However, additional infrastructure can be used for a more scalable materialization process.

• Online Store: The online store is a database that stores only the latest feature values for each entity. The online store is either populated through materialization jobs or through stream ingestion.

• Offline Store: The offline store persists batch data that has been ingested into Feast. This data is used for producing training datasets. For feature retrieval and materialization, Feast does not manage the offline store directly, but runs queries against it. However, offline stores can be configured to support writes if Feast configures logging functionality of served features.

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

See

Standards

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

1. The plugin must have tests. Ideally it would use the Feast universal tests (see this for an example), but custom tests are fine.

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.

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

Feast uses online stores to serve features at low latency. Feature values are loaded from data sources into the online store through materialization, which can be triggered through the materialize command.

The storage schema of features within the online store mirrors that of the original data source. One key difference is that for each , only the latest feature values are stored. No historical values are stored.

Here is an example batch data source:

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

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

Do feature views have to include entities?

No, there are .

How does Feast handle model or feature versioning?

Feast expects that each version of a model corresponds to a different feature service.

Feature views once they are used by a feature service are intended to be immutable and not deleted (until a feature service is removed). In the future, feast plan and feast apply will throw errors if it sees this kind of behavior.

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

How do I run get_historical_features without providing an entity dataframe?

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).

It is a good idea though to lock down the registry file so only the CI/CD pipeline can modify it. That way data scientists and other users cannot accidentally modify the registry and lose other team's data.

Does Feast support streaming sources?

Does Feast support feature transformation?

There are several kinds of transformations:

• • These transformations are Pandas transformations run on batch data when you call get_historical_features and at online serving time when you call `get_online_features.

  • Note that if you use push sources to ingest streaming features, these transformations will execute on the fly as well

• • These will include SQL + PySpark based transformations on batch data sources.

• Streaming transformations (RFC in progress)

Does Feast have a Web UI?

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)