IKV is a fully-managed embedded key-value store, primarily designed for storing ML features. Most key-value stores (think Redis or Cassandra) need a remote database cluster, whereas IKV allows you to utilize your existing application infrastructure to store data (cost efficient) and access it without any network calls (better performance). See detailed performance benchmarks and cost comparison with Redis on https://inlined.io. IKV can be used as an online-store in Feast, the rest of this guide goes over the setup.
Make sure you have Python and pip
installed.
Install the Feast SDK and CLI: pip install feast
In order to use this online store, you'll need to install the IKV extra (along with the dependency needed for the offline store of choice). E.g.
pip install 'feast[gcp, ikv]'
pip install 'feast[snowflake, ikv]'
pip install 'feast[aws, ikv]'
pip install 'feast[azure, ikv]'
You can get started by using any of the other templates (e.g. feast init -t gcp
or feast init -t snowflake
or feast init -t aws
), and then swapping in IKV as the online store as seen below in the examples.
Go to https://inlined.io or email onboarding[at]inlined.io
Update my_feature_repo/feature_store.yaml
with the below contents:
After provisioning an IKV account/store, you should have an account id, passkey and store-name. Additionally you must specify a mount-directory - where IKV will pull/update (maintain) a copy of the index for online reads (IKV is an embedded database). It can be skipped only if you don't plan to read any data from this container. The mount directory path usually points to a location on local/remote disk.
The full set of configuration options is available in IKVOnlineStoreConfig at sdk/python/feast/infra/online_stores/contrib/ikv_online_store/ikv.py
The set of functionality supported by online stores is described in detail here. Below is a matrix indicating which functionality is supported by the IKV online store.
To compare this set of functionality against other online stores, please see the full functionality matrix.
IKV | |
---|---|
write feature values to the online store
yes
read feature values from the online store
yes
update infrastructure (e.g. tables) in the online store
yes
teardown infrastructure (e.g. tables) in the online store
yes
generate a plan of infrastructure changes
no
support for on-demand transforms
yes
readable by Python SDK
yes
readable by Java
no
readable by Go
no
support for entityless feature views
yes
support for concurrent writing to the same key
yes
support for ttl (time to live) at retrieval
no
support for deleting expired data
no
collocated by feature view
no
collocated by feature service
no
collocated by entity key
yes