Feathr feature store joins LF AI & Data Foundation

By Xiaoyong Zhu, Principal Data Scientist, Azure Data

Content type
Project updates

Together with our colleagues at LinkedIn, we are happy to announce that Feathr feature store is joining the LF AI & Data Foundation, an umbrella foundation of the Linux Foundation supporting open source innovation in artificial intelligence and data.

Feathr, as an enterprise feature store, was developed on LinkedIn in 2017. Being an enterprise-focused feature store, it empowers hundreds of AI applications at LinkedIn, such as Economic Graph. Feathr reduced the engineering time required for adding and experimenting with new features from weeks to days and performed faster than the custom feature processing pipelines it replaced by as much as 50 percent.

diagram — **Figure 1:** How Feathr simplifies the feature engineering pipeline.

In spring 2022, we worked closely with our LinkedIn colleagues to make Feathr available on Azure and assisted with open sourcing it in April. Since then, we have seen a noticeable increase in community momentum. Customers applied Feathr in a variety of industries including retail, financial institutions, and domains such as enterprise software. The community also grew fast, with contributors from many different companies and open source enthusiasts.

Feature store is a space where data meets AI, and the mission of LF AI & Data Foundation—to build and support an open AI and data community, and drive open source innovation in the AI and data domains by enabling collaboration and the creation of new opportunities—aligns closely with the vision for Feathr. That is why we are super excited to have Feathr join the LF AI & Data Foundation, so that we can continue to invest in a healthy and sustainable community while advancing project goals through collaboration with other projects from Linux AI & Data Foundation.

Joining the Linux AI & Data Foundation opens a new chapter for Feathr and its community, and we are excited to use this opportunity to make machine learning operations (MLOps) easier and AI more accessible. The Feathr team is dedicated to bringing more functionalities into Feathr, and by joining Linux AI & Data Foundation, we welcome more community members to join this journey.