Feature Store Resources

Overview

• Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - announced in Nov. 2020.
• Google Clound Vertex AI Feature Store.
• Tecton - Three founders from Uber Michelangelo - $60m total - series C.
• Logical Clocks - Hopworks - eu1.3m ($1.6m) - seed.
• Feast - open source project initiated by Google Cloud and Gojek. Key Gojek Feast developer joins Tecton on 2020-11-17.
• Databricks Feature Store.
• Molecula - $23.6Mm total - Series A.
• Zipline - Airbnb’s feature store - not (yet) open-sourced.
• Splice ML Manager - little documentation on its feature store feature. Company has folded as of 2021-08.

SageMaker Feature Store

• Amazon SageMaker Feature Store

• Create, Store, and Share Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
  • Share Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
  • Get started with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
  • Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - sagemaker.readthedocs

• Scale ML feature ingestion using Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - 2021-09-20
• Use Amazon SageMaker Feature Store in a Java environment - 2021-07-20
• New – Store, Discover, and Share Machine Learning Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - 2020-12-08

• AWS Announces Nine New Amazon SageMaker Capabilities - PR - 2020-12-08
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - AWS - 2020-12-08
• AWS Announces Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - InfoQ - 2012-12-17
• AWS expands on SageMaker capabilities with end-to-end features for machine learning - teccrunch - 2012-12-08

• Using streaming ingestion with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store to make ML-backed decisions in near-real time - awsfeed - 2020-12-10

Google Cloud

• https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/featurestore
• https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/featurestore/overview
• https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/featurestore/concepts
• Feature Serving: Batch Serving - Online serving
• https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/quotas#featurestore

Tecton

• www.tecton.ai - Enterprise Feature Store for Machine Learning
• What is a feature store?
• The Tecton Feature Store
• Resources
  • Basic vs. Enterprise Feature Stores - white papers
• https://github.com/tecton-ai - not much here

• Founders: 3 engineers from Uber’s Michelangelo ML platform
  • CEO Mike Del Balso, CTO Kevin Stumpf and VP of Engineering Jeremy Hermann
• Willem Pienaar - Engineering lead - Singapore - Twitter - Feast lead joined Tecton in Nov. 2020

• Crunchbase - Tecton - total $60M
  • $35m - Series B - 2020-12-07
  • $20m - Series A - 2020-04-28
  • $05m - Seed - 2018-12-04
• Tecton.ai nabs $35M Series B as it releases machine learning feature store - techcrunch - 2020-12-07
• Tecton.ai emerges from stealth with $20M Series A to build machine learning platform - techcrunch - 2020-12-07
• Tecton.ai Snags $20 Million To Solve AI’s Data Problem - forbes - 2020-05-02

• https://www.tecton.ai/blog
• https://www.tecton.ai/blog/introducing-low-latency-streaming-pipelines-for-real-time-ml/ - 2021-08-09
• Amazon SageMaker and Tecton: How to Choose the Right Feature Store on AWS - 2020-12-10
• Why Tecton is Backing the Feast Open Source Feature Store - 2020-11-16 -
• What is a Feature Store? - 2020-10-20

• Tecton: Machine Learning Platform from Uber with Kevin Stumpf - softwareengineeringdaily - transcript - 2020-06-03

• Accelerating the ML Lifecycle with an Enterprise-Grade Feature Store - Atlassian - video - slides - DAIS 2020

Logical Clocks - Hopsworks

• https://www.logicalclocks.com
• Feature Store
• Webinars
• https://github.com/logicalclocks - local install: Vagrant

• https://www.hopsworks.ai
• Feature Store - very long page - doc
• Articles
  • Hopsworks Feature Store 2.0 - data-for-ai - 2020-11-21

• About Logical Clocks
• Founded in 2016 by members of the Distributed Computing Group at KTH of Sweden
• Jim Dowling is CEO of Logical Clocks

• Crunchbase - Logical Clocks - euro 1.3M ($1.6m) - seed round - 2018-11-20
• Note: this implies they are profitable enough to support a staff of 25.

• https://www.logicalclocks.com/blog
• MLOps Versioned Feature Data with a Lakehouse - 2021-08-03
• Scalable metadata with HopsFS - 2021-05-31
• Hopsworks Feature Store for AWS SageMaker - 2020-05-18
• Hopsworks Feature Store for Databricks - 2020-04-23
• Try Hopsworks Feature Store: The Missing Data Layer in ML Pipelines - 2018-12-30

• TLDR
  • RonDB is a stable distribution of MySQL NDB Cluster, a key-value store with SQL capabilities.
  • RonDB is brought to you by the RonDB team at Logical Clocks AB and the development team at iClaustron AB.
• Blog
  • RonDB on AWS, Azure and GCP using Sysbench - 2021-09-03
  • RonDB: key-value store faster than Redis - 2021-02-26
  • New RonDB Beta Release 21.10.1 - 2021-07-29
• https://github.com/logicalclocks/rondb
• Mikael Ronström - Developer of AXE VM, NDB Cluster, MySQL Cluster, MySQL InnoDB, Scaling MySQL Server, MySQL Partitioning, MySQL Threadpool and now RonDB
  • https://github.com/mronstro
  • http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.com/blog
    • http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.com/2021/09/automatic-memory-management-in-rondb.html - 2021-09-23
    • http://mikaelronstrom.blogspot.com/2021/08/rondb-and-docker-compose.html - 2021-08-12

• Time Travel and Provenance for Machine Learning Pipelines - p. 13 in PDF- Logical Clocks article - from OpML '20 conference - 2020-07-28 -
• Introducing the Feature Store - the Data Warehouse for Machine Learning - globalnewswite - 2019-01-21
• KFServing, Model Monitoring with Apache Spark and a Feature Store - Dowling - DAIS 2021

• Building a Feature Store around Dataframes and Apache Spark - slides - Dowling - Spark Summit 2020
• Hopsworks for Databricks - github Jupyter notebook examples
• Zoom Hopsworks Feature Store - Databricks - Jim Dowling  - mp4 - 1:00:29 - 2020-08-17 - slack thread - internal

• Runs on AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem.
• Integrates with SageMaker, Databricks, Kubernetes and Cloudera.
• Have offline and online feature stores.
• Offline is powered by Hive and Hudi.
• In conversations with Databricks and Matei.
• Interested in Delta, but waiting for OSS Delta to become more like Databricks Delta (e.g. z-order).
• Have only 25 people, question of priorities.
• Hoping by the end of year - source Sep. 2020 - (2020?).
• Don’t use MLflow since have their own experiment tracking system - with projects.

Molecula

• Molecula home
  • Products - Feature Store
• Founders
  • Leadership
  • Higinio Maycotte - CEO - LinkedIn and Twitter
    • great-grandson of the Mexican General who shot off Pancho Villa’s leg
  • Travis Turner - Chief Architect - LinkedIn - Twitter  
• Molecula - Crunchbase - Molecula - LinkedIn
• https://github.com/molecula
• Pilosa - FAQ
  • The Founder of Umbel Launched Pilosa to Crunch Big Data Faster- 2017-05-02

• Crunchbase - Molecula - total $23.6M
  • $17.6m - Series A - 2021-01-13
  • $6m - Seed - 2021-08-22 - The Seraph Group, Lontra Ventures, Velar Capital, Capital Factory, Andrew Busey and Jason Dorsey
• Articles
  • Molecula raises $17.6 million for its AI feature store technology - venturebeat - 2021-01-13
  • Molecula Raises $17.6M to Democratize Large-Scale Analytics, Plans Hiring Push - builtinaustin - 2021-01-13
  • Hiring surge, new product on tap after Molecula snags $17.6M in funding - bizjournals - 2021-01-13
  • Molecula Secures $17.6 Million in Series A Funding to Democratize Machine-Scale Analytics and A - globenews - 2021-01-13
  • Austin Data Virtualization Startup Molecula Closes $6M Seed Round - bizjournals - 2021-08-22

• https://www.molecula.com/products
  • Molecula Enterprise Feature Store - Molecula provides centralized access to all your big data by reducing the dimensionality of the original source data , into a highly-optimized format that is natively predisposed for real-time machine-scale analytics and AI
• A New Paradigm to Data Access - Datasheet

• Molecula Named in Gartner Market Guide for Analytics Query Accelerators - globenews - 2020-12-21

Rasgo

• https://www.rasgoml.com
  • “Rasgo empowers Data Scientists to accelerate the critical, yet mundane, pre-model preparation steps they hate by delivering efficiencies across data extraction and exploration, data preparation, and feature engineering portions of the lifecycle”
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/rasgo-intelligence
• https://github.com/rasgointelligence
  • https://github.com/rasgointelligence/PyRasgo
  • https://github.com/rasgointelligence/feature-engineering-tutorials
• https://www.rasgoml.com/post/rasgo-native-integration-with-snowpark

• Jared Parker - CEO - director of sales at Domino Data Lab - LinkedIn
• Patrick Dougherty - CTO - LinkedIn

• Crunchbase - Rasgo - total $20mM
  • $20m - Series A - 2021-06-24 - Insight Partners and Unusual Ventures.
  • $5.1M - Seed - 2020-07 - Unusual Ventures
• Articles
  • https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/24/feature-store-platform-rasgo-raises-20m/ - 2021-06-24
    • Rasgo has five customers
  • https://www.alleywatch.com/2021/06/rasgo-intelligence-data-science-management-platform-feature-store-machine-learning-ops-jared-parker/ - 2021-06-24
    • Rasgo is different in that it is the only feature store on the market that is fully SaaS-based and natively integrates with leading cloud data warehouses.

Kaskada

• https://kaskada.com
• https://twitter.com/kaskadainc

• AI Under the Hood: Kaskada, Inc. - insidebigdata - 2020-03-19
• Kaskada raises $8 million to facilitate AI feature engineering - 2020-02-04
• Ex-Google Cloud engineers raise $8M for Seattle machine learning startup Kaskada - geekwire - 2020-02-04
• Google Cloud vets launch Seattle startup Kaskada to bolster machine learning tech with real-time data - geekwire - 2019-08-02

• Crunchbase - Kaskada - total $9.8M
  • $1.8m - Seed
  • $8m - Series A

Pinecone

• https://www.pinecone.io
  • Vector database for machine learning
  • We are engineers who built large machine learning platforms, databases, and search engines at AWS (SageMaker), Facebook, Yahoo, and Google
• Team
  • Edo Liberty - CEO
  • Amir Sadoughi - Head of Engineering
  • Lior Ehrenfeld - COO
  • Greg Kogan - VP Marketing
• Funding
  • Crunchbase - Pinecone
    • $10m - 2021-01-27

Alteryx Featuretools

• Feature Labs
• https://www.alteryx.com/innovation-labs
• github
  • https://github.com/alteryx/featuretools - python library for automated feature engineering
  • https://github.com/Featuretools/Automated-Manual-Comparison
• https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Analytics/Innovating-in-Data-Science-and-Machine-Learning-Modeling-Better/ba-p/472421 - blog - 2019-10-04
  • welcome the Feature Labs team to the Alteryx team 
• Feature Labs - Crunchbase
  • Born out of MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab
  • Team
    • Max Kanter: CEO
    • Alan Jacobson: Chief Data and Analytics Officer
• Articles
  • https://www.zdnet.com/article/alteryx-buys-feature-labs-to-automate-ml-feature-engineering/ - 2019-10-04

Feast

• https://feast.dev
• https://github.com/feast-dev/feast - local install: docker containers
• https://docs.feast.dev
  • Community - Glossary
• Introduction to Feast - kubeflow - This Kubeflow component has alpha status with limited support
  • Getting started with Feast
• Key Founding Articles
  • Introducing Feast: an open source feature store for machine learning - cloud.google - 2020-01-18
  • Feast: Bridging ML Models and Data - gojek eng - 2020-02-10
• Blog
  • https://blog.feast.dev
  • Feast Joins The Linux Foundation for AI & Data - 2020-11-10
  • What is a Feature Store? - Pienaar and Del Balso - 2020-11-06
  • A State of Feast - Pienaar - 2020-10-28
• Spark Summit
  • https://databricks.com/speaker/willem-pienaar
  • Scaling Data and ML with Apache Spark and Feast - slides - Pienaar - Spark Summit 2020
  • Scaling Ride-Hailing with Machine Learning on MLflow - slides - gojek - Spark Summit 2019
• Articles
  • Machine Learning Features discovery with Feast and Amundsen - getindata - 2020-12-20

Databricks Feature Store

• Databricks Feature Store - AWS - Azure - Databricks docs
• Databricks Announces the First Feature Store Co-designed with a Data and MLOps Platform - blog - 2021-05-27
• Solving the Feature Store Problem - video - 56:20 - DAIS 2021 - Clemens ML PM

Zipline

• Airbnb’s Feature Store
• Presentations
  • Zipline – A Declarative Feature Engineering Framework - Simha - video 42:05 - slides - SAIS 2020
  • Zipline—Airbnb’s Declarative Feature Engineering Framework - Zanoyan/Shapiro - video/slides - SAIS 2019 EU
  • A Declarative Feature Engineering Library- strangeloop - Simha - video - 2019-09-13
• What is a Feature-Store - oneraynyday - 2020-09-22
  • Extensive technical details about Zipline from Airbnb engineer -
• Using Machine Learning to Predict Value of Homes On Airbnb - medium - 2017-07-17

Featurestore.org

• https://www.featurestore.org - Feature Store for ML
• https://docs.featurestore.org
• https://medium.com/data-for-ai - Feature Stores for Machine Learning - blog
  • Feature Store vs Data Warehouse - 2020-10-09
  • Data Lake vs Feature Store - 2020-08-21
  • The Importance of Having a Feature Store - 2020-08-27
  • Building a Feature Store - 2020-08-26

Splice Machine

• https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/26/splice_machine_insolvency/ - 2021-08-26
• TLDR: Mentions of feature store but there are no details on their website. Apparently their ML Manager has a feature store which is not described anywhere.
• ML Manager - based on MLflow - video.
  • Combine online and offline storage under a single, SQL HTAP (Hybrid transactional/analytical processing) database.
• Webinars
  • Simplifying the Feature Store
  • Unleash ML Productivity with a Feature Store- demo of the Splice Machine ML Manager and understand how it can be used as a feature store - 2020-06-30
• Meetup: Feature Store Meetup #2 with Uber & Splice Machine - 2021-01-14
• Articles
  • How Optimizing MLOps Can Revolutionize Enterprise AI - Feature Stores - CEO Zweben - InfoQ - 2021-03-06
  • How Feature Stores will revolutionize Enterprise AI - CEO Zweben - insidebigdata - 2020-12-29

Articles

• https://mlops.community/learn/feature-store/ - mlops.community
• Feature Stores: The Data Side of ML Pipelines - RISELab blog - 2021-04-06
• Why Automated Feature Selection Has Its Risks - kdnuggets - 2021-04
• Feature store repositories emerge as an MLOps linchpin for advancing AI - venturebeat - 2021-01-15
• What are Feature Stores and Why Are They Critical for Scaling Data Science? - towardsdatascience - 2020-04-07
• What is a Feature Store? - medium - 2020-03-19
• Feature Selection Techniques in Python: Predicting Hotel Cancellations - grogan - 2020-02-03
• Notes
  • My Notes From Spark+AI Summit 2020- eugeneyan
  • Machine Learning (ML) Feature Store - gabormelli
• Feature Forge
• https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/hands-on-with-feature-engineering-techniques-broad-introduction-def389c1fc25 - 2020-02-20

Misc

• Feature Stores for ML Global Meetup Group
• https://github.com/nikolaydubina/go-featureprocessing - Fast, simple sklearn-like feature processing for Go
• Buzzsaw: A System for High Speed Feature Engineering - Rust-based - PDF