What Is a Feature Store?

A feature store is a modern data infrastructure that enables organizations to productionize their machine learning applications by managing data sets and pipelines needed for operational ML. It acts as a central hub for feature data and metadata across an ML project's lifecycle, reducing duplication of data engineering efforts, speeding up the machine learning lifecycle, and unlocking collaboration among data science teams. A feature store consists of five primary components: Transformation, Storage, Serving, Monitoring, and Feature Registry, which work together to provide a standardized interface between models and data, automate feature computation, backfills, and logging, share and reuse feature pipelines across teams, track feature versions, lineage, and metadata, and monitor the health of feature pipelines in production. The primary purpose of a feature store is to solve the full set of data management problems encountered when building and operating operational ML applications, enabling organizations to build, deploy, and reason about feature pipelines across environments with ease.