Building real-time feature engineering systems isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At first glance, it may feel like just another microservice, pu

Part II: Challenges in Building a Real-Time Feature Engineering System

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2024-10-23 16:00:02

Building real-time feature engineering systems isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At first glance, it may feel like just another microservice, pulling in data and serving it on demand. But when you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll find a web of challenges — from data inconsistency and feature disparity to maintaining scale and performance.

In this post, we explore the key challenges engineers face before even starting to build a real-time feature engineering system. This isn’t just about implementing another feature store; it’s about understanding the intricacies of data pipelines, misgauged features, and more.

In the last post, we discussed how feature engineering is a critical piece in deploying realtime models. In terms of feature freshness, features could be divided into two types

From an engineering perspective building systems for real time features is a hard problem. And there doesn’t exist an open source solution which completely solves it. In this post we are going to discuss different challenges faced building these systems.