From EC2 to K8s: Zalando's Journey to Large-Scale, Real-Time Feature Serving.

Zalando is Europe’s largest online fashion platform, operating in over 25 countries and serving over 50 million customers. It uses the Hopsworks feature store to support real-time AI use cases, such as personalized recommendations. In this talk, we will look at systems aspects of operating a feature store at scale. In particular, we will explore challenges such as:

High availability through replicated data across availability zones.Resilience by federating online feature stores to reduce the blast radiusThe pros and cons of a Kubernetes (4.x) environment over an EC2 deployment (3.9), and why this migration to Kubernetes was necessary.Auto-scaling to optimize resource utilization for daily and seasonal workload changes.Implementation of Infrastructure as Code utilizing the Hopsworks Managed Clusters API.