Feast

Feast (Feature Store) is a CNCF-incubated open-source framework designed to bridge the gap between data engineering and machine learning. As of 2026, Feast remains the industry standard for managing the operational lifecycle of ML features. It provides a unified interface for defining, storing, and serving features, ensuring that the same feature logic is applied during both model training (offline) and real-time inference (online). The architecture is decoupled, allowing it to interface with high-performance storage backends like Redis or DynamoDB for low-latency online retrieval, and data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift for historical point-in-time joins. This prevents 'training-serving skew,' one of the most common failure modes in production AI. Feast's 2026 positioning emphasizes its role as the 'connective tissue' in the modern AI stack, enabling teams to scale from a single model to thousands of production-grade features without reinventing data pipelines for every new deployment.