Products
The hidden engineering behind machine learning products at Helixa
December 13, 2020
Data and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are now widespread and adopted by literally all industries. Although recent advancements in the field have reached an unthinkable level of maturity, many organizations still struggle with turning these advances into tangible profits. Unfortunately, many ML projects get stuck in a proof-of-concept stage without ever reaching customers and generating revenue. In order to effectively adopt ML technologies, enterprises need to build the right business cases as well as to be ready to face the inevitable technical challenges. In this talk, we will share some common pitfalls, lessons learned, and engineering practices, faced while building customer-facing enterprise ML products. In particular, we will focus on the engineering that delivers real-time audience insights everyday to thousands of marketers via the Helixa’s market research platform.
During the talk you will learn:
- An overview of the Helixa ML end-to-end system
- Useful engineering practices and recommended tools (PyData stack, AWS, Alluxio, scikit-learn, tensorflow, mlflow, jupyter, github, docker, Spark, to name a few..)
- The R&D workflow and how it integrates with the production system
- Infrastructure considerations for scalable and cheap deployment, monitoring, and alerting
- How to leverage modern cloud serverless architectures for data and machine learning applications
Data and Machine Learning (ML) technologies are now widespread and adopted by literally all industries. Although recent advancements in the field have reached an unthinkable level of maturity, many organizations still struggle with turning these advances into tangible profits. Unfortunately, many ML projects get stuck in a proof-of-concept stage without ever reaching customers and generating revenue. In order to effectively adopt ML technologies, enterprises need to build the right business cases as well as to be ready to face the inevitable technical challenges. In this talk, we will share some common pitfalls, lessons learned, and engineering practices, faced while building customer-facing enterprise ML products. In particular, we will focus on the engineering that delivers real-time audience insights everyday to thousands of marketers via the Helixa’s market research platform.
During the talk you will learn:
- An overview of the Helixa ML end-to-end system
- Useful engineering practices and recommended tools (PyData stack, AWS, Alluxio, scikit-learn, tensorflow, mlflow, jupyter, github, docker, Spark, to name a few..)
- The R&D workflow and how it integrates with the production system
- Infrastructure considerations for scalable and cheap deployment, monitoring, and alerting
- How to leverage modern cloud serverless architectures for data and machine learning applications
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Videos
Bridging Speed and Scale: AWS S3 Data Caching for Low-Latency, Semantically-Rich AI Workloads

Amazon S3 and other cloud object stores have become the de facto storage system for organizations large and small. And it’s no wonder why. Cloud object stores deliver unprecedented flexibility with unlimited capacity that scales on demand and ensures data durability out-of-the-box at unbeatable prices.
Yet as workloads shift toward real-time AI, inference, feature stores, and agentic memory systems, S3’s latency and limited semantics begin to show their limits. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to augment — rather than replace — S3 with a tiered architecture that restores sub-millisecond performance, richer semantics, and high throughput — all while preserving S3’s advantages of low-cost capacity, durability, and operational simplicity.
We’ll walk through:
- The key challenges posed by latency-sensitive, semantically rich workloads (e.g. feature stores, RAG pipelines, write-ahead logs)
- Why “just upgrading storage” isn’t sufficient — the bottlenecks in metadata, object access latency, and write semantics
- How Alluxio transparently layers on top of S3 to provide ultra-low latency caching, append semantics, and zero data migration with both FSx-style POSIX access and S3 API access
- Real-world results: achieving sub-ms TTFB, 90%+ GPU utilization in ML training, 80X faster feature store query response times, and dramatic cost savings from reduced S3 operations
- Trade-offs, deployment patterns, and best practices for integrating this tiered approach in your AI/analytics stack
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AI/ML Infra Meetup | AI at scale Architecting Scalable, Deployable and Resilient Infrastructure

Pratik Mishra delivered insights on architecting scalable, deployable, and resilient AI infrastructure at scale. His discussion on fault tolerance, checkpoint optimization, and the democratization of AI compute through AMD's open ecosystem resonated strongly with the challenges teams face in production ML deployments.
September 30, 2025
AI/ML Infra Meetup | Alluxio + S3 A Tiered Architecture for Latency-Critical, Semantically-Rich Workloads

In this talk, Bin Fan, VP of Technology at Alluxio, presents on building tiered architectures that bring sub-millisecond latency to S3-based workloads. The comparison showing Alluxio's 45x performance improvement over S3 Standard and 5x over S3 Express One Zone demonstrated the critical role the performance & caching layer plays in modern AI infrastructure.
September 30, 2025