Atlassian implemented Tecton’s feature platform to build and deploy machine learning features as a core component of Atlassian’s ML stack.
Went from 96% to 99.9% serving and training data consistency
From 3 months to 1 day to deploy new features
From maintaining Atlassian’s initial homebuilt feature store
As a net result of using the Tecton feature store, we’ve improved over 200,000 customer interactions every day. This is a monumental improvement for us"
The complexity, time, and effort required to build and deploy ML data pipelines were slowing down the delivery of ML applications:
Atlassian has improved over 200,000 customer interactions per day with Tecton:
Atlassian aims to provide exceptional experiences to its vast base of daily users. In support of that objective, the Search and Smarts team applies predictive analytics and Machine Learning to power intelligent experiences across its customer ecosystem.
Before engaging with Tecton, one of the Search and Smarts team’s most visible projects was to predict and recommend user mentions in Jira and Confluence. Data scientists spent multiple months building the first features and generating training datasets with promising results. But they soon realized that deploying these features in production would be a challenge, particularly due to the use of streaming data.
To serve their features in production, the team set out to build an internal feature store. They assigned ~3 engineers who successfully built the first version in about one year. The internal feature store addressed the most pressing issue of serving features online, but didn’t bridge the data science / engineering gap and would not scale to support all of Atlassian’s needs. Teams were still operating in silos, it still took months of effort to build production pipelines, and the lack of training / serving parity was reducing the accuracy of predictions.
To address these gaps, Atlassian evaluated the Tecton feature store to manage the complete lifecycle of features in Atlassian’s operational ML stack. After a successful Proof of Concept, Tecton was deployed in production to power predictive experiences, such as recommending content fields in Jira and Confluence. By using Tecton as their data platform for ML, Atlassian has accelerated the delivery of new features from a range of 1-3 months to just 1 day, and has increased the prediction accuracy of existing models by 2%. These changes are directly improving over 200,000 customer interactions every day in Jira and Confluence.
The Search and Smarts team builds and operates multiple ML applications to improve the customer experience in Atlassian products. For example, the team built an application to predict user mentions, assignees, and labels in Jira and Confluence. User mentions are used to draw someone’s attention to a page or comment, while assignees and labels are used to allocate work and categorize content. Instead of simply providing a dropdown list by alphabetical order, models predict and suggest the right content up to 85% of the time. For power users that are assigning 100s of tickets a day, this can meaningfully reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks.
Another high-priority use case is to improve the in-product search experience. Search is used extensively to quickly find relevant pages and to track down issues. It’s an essential capability for large teams that may have thousands of pages and issues to search through.
The Search and Smarts team quickly realized that building and deploying these ML applications at scale would require a new platform for operational ML. Indeed, Atlassian operates at massive scale:
Getting the first models to production at this level of scale was a complex process. Without a feature store in place to manage the lifecycle of ML features, teams were struggling with:
Lack of collaboration tools spanning data science and engineering: The teams didn’t have a single repository of features that spanned both development and production environments. Keeping code in sync between data science and engineering required extensive manual coordination through meetings and written documents.
Complexity of incorporating streaming data: Many of Atlassian’s features are built with a combination of batch and streaming data to leverage the company’s valuable historical information while also capturing the latest events. The use of streaming data introduced unique challenges, such as carefully managing eventtime to prevent data leakage in training datasets and implementing streaming pipelines in production.
Lead times of multiple months to deploy production pipelines: Features created by data scientists were not production-ready. Much of the data scientists’ work needed to be reimplemented for production by a separate data engineering team. This included creating and maintaining the infrastructure to process features with streaming data, hardening production pipelines, and adding monitoring to batch pipelines.
Reduced prediction accuracy due to training / serving skew: The pipelines used to serve online and offline data were built with different code bases and different data sources. This introduced online / offline data skew which in turn reduced the accuracy of predictions.
To overcome these challenges, the team set out to build an internal feature store from scratch. Inspired by the Uber Michelangelo platform, Atlassian’s original feature store was successfully delivered by a small team of ~3 full-time engineers in one year. The feature store was successful in serving features online, but it was not designed to solve the tooling gap between data science and engineering. Data scientists were still building features in a separate environment from production, and pipelines still needed to be re-implemented in production.
Tecton was founded by the creators of Uber Michelangelo and provides an enterprise-ready feature store. Atlassian believed that Tecton could address many of its challenges in productionizing ML, while eliminating the need to manage and maintain its own internal feature store.
Atlassian and Tecton ran a Proof Of Concept project. Over the course of a few months, the teams worked together to implement the Tecton enterprise feature store and test the most important use case on Tecton: the models that predict user mentions, assignees, and labels in Jira and Confluence. After the successful POC, Atlassian is now running multiple models in production on Tecton, and has decided to deploy the Tecton feature store as a core component of Atlassian’s ML stack for future use cases.
We have Tecton running at 99.9% accuracy across all of our features, with only minimal work required from us. This is a really phenomenal improvement."
The Tecton enterprise feature store is serving online features for several production models, has improved over 200,000 customer interactions per day, and provides a strong foundation to scale ML at Atlassian. Powered by Tecton, the Search and Smarts team:
Introduced engineering best practices with centrally-managed feature definitions. Data scientists now have a consistent way of defining features as code stored in a Git version-control repository and surfaced to everyone at the company. Data scientists can search and discover existing features, and collaborate more effectively on new feature development. The central feature definitions are used to generate both offline training data and online serving data, providing consistency in the way features are managed across data science and engineering.
Accelerated the time to build and deploy new features from 1-3 months to 1 day. Data scientists can discover existing features to repurpose across models, and build and deploy new features to production in just 1 day. They can create accurate training datasets with just a few lines of code, relying on Tecton to manage time travel and prevent data leakage. They can serve streaming features to production instantly without depending on data engineering teams to reimplement pipelines. These sorts of timeframes empower data scientists to innovate at a much faster pace.
Improved the prediction accuracy of existing models by 2%. Once migrated to Tecton, prediction accuracy increased by 2% by delivering more accurate data and eliminating training/serving skew. The ease of use of Tecton enabled the teams to build new models that increased prediction accuracy up to 20%.
Improved the accuracy of online features from 95%–97% accurate to 99.9% accurate. Tecton generates both training and serving data from a single pipeline compiled directly from data scientists’ feature definitions. By eliminating the need to reimplement pipelines in production, Tecton ensures training/serving parity and can surface more accurate insights.
Reduced the engineering load by 2–3 FTE in the data infrastructure team. Atlassian no longer needs to build and manage its own feature store. This frees up precious engineering time in the data infrastructure team to work on other high-priority projects.
To achieve the company’s vision of building smarter, ML-powered user experiences, Atlassian needed an operational ML platform to productionize ML at scale. By using the Tecton enterprise feature store as the data layer of its operational ML stack, Atlassian now has the infrastructure in place to scale ML initiatives and support their longterm product vision. Tecton provides the confidence of a high performing, always-available system that empowers data scientists to build new features and deploy them to production quickly and reliably.
The complexity, time, and effort required to build and deploy ML data pipelines were slowing down the delivery of ML applications:
Atlassian has improved over 200,000 customer interactions per day with Tecton:
Unfortunately, Tecton does not currently support these clouds. We’ll make sure to let you know when this changes!
However, we are currently looking to interview members of the machine learning community to learn more about current trends.
If you’d like to participate, please book a 30-min slot with us here and we’ll send you a $50 amazon gift card in appreciation for your time after the interview.
or
Interested in trying Tecton? Leave us your information below and we’ll be in touch.
Unfortunately, Tecton does not currently support these clouds. We’ll make sure to let you know when this changes!
However, we are currently looking to interview members of the machine learning community to learn more about current trends.
If you’d like to participate, please book a 30-min slot with us here and we’ll send you a $50 amazon gift card in appreciation for your time after the interview.
or
Interested in trying Tecton? Leave us your information below and we’ll be in touch.
Unfortunately, Tecton does not currently support these clouds. We’ll make sure to let you know when this changes!
However, we are currently looking to interview members of the machine learning community to learn more about current trends.
If you’d like to participate, please book a 30-min slot with us here and we’ll send you a $50 amazon gift card in appreciation for your time after the interview.
or