Zalando's Journey to Large-Scale, Real-Time Feature Serving with Hopsworks - FS Summit 2025

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. This talks covers the following points: - Resilience by federating online feature stores to reduce the blast radius The 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. About the Speaker: Morteza Ghasempour is a Senior Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience building fault-tolerant, cloud-native infrastructure for large-scale ML and data platforms. He specializes in Kubernetes, AWS, and open-source tools, with a passion for optimizing GPU workloads and empowering teams through automation and mentorship.