F3 Lightning: How Meta Accelerates Ads ML Features to Production at Scale
Meta built F3 Lightning to let individual ML features ship independently instead of as one giant merged release. The original F3 framework compiled features into a single merged graph to share computation, but that meant one bad feature definition blocked every release. F3 Lightning decouples releases from execution using stable computation identifiers, a single shared execution plan, one shared memory buffer, and dense index mapping. The result: comparable features reach production about 3.6x faster, with no added infrastructure compute cost.
