Effective feature store implementation relies heavily on sound architectural design. This chapter focuses on the structural aspects required for scalable and resilient systems. We will examine the interplay of core components such as registries, online stores, and offline stores.

You'll learn about specific architectural patterns for low-latency online serving, often involving strategies to minimize retrieval time $T_{retrieval}$, and scalable offline store designs suitable for large-volume batch processing. We will also cover metadata management techniques critical for organization and discoverability. Furthermore, we analyze the trade-offs between integrated and decoupled system designs and address considerations for multi-region or multi-cloud deployments. The chapter includes a practical exercise to apply these concepts to a design problem.