acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to Bogdan Pechenkin for his direct contribution to preparing draft chapters and to Igor Kotenkov, Rustem Feyzkhanov, Evgenii Makarov, and Adam Eldarov for conducting the review during the work-in-progress stages.

We would like to thank Simon Kozlov and Sam Weiss, whose approach to problem-solving inspired many pieces of this book; Sergey Foris for his contribution as an editor; and Tatyana Putilova for enlivening the book with beautiful yet informative illustrations.

Thank you to our technical editor, Ioannis Atsonios, who has worked in academia, consulting, and industry in various positions including data product ideation, craft of proof of concepts, and actual productization, in addition to carrying out extensive research and development in machine learning, particularly in personalization systems.

We would like to give our kudos to all the reviewers: Aleksei Agarkov, Antonios Tsaltas, Arijit Dasgupta, Craig Henderson, Dinesh Ghanta, Flayol Frédéric, George Onofrei, Konstantin Kliakhandler, Lakshminarayanan A.S., Laura Uzcategui, Lucian M. Sasu, Maxim Volgin, Mikael Dautrey, Mike Wright, Mirerfan Gheibi, Nikos Kanakaris, Ninoslav Cerkez, Odysseas Pentakalso, Oliver Korten, Prashant Kowshik, Robert Diana, Sriram Macharla, Stephen John Warnett, Stipe Cuvalo, Vatsal Desai, Vishnu Ram Venkataraman, and William Jamir Silva; we thank you for your critiques and invaluable insights, which helped fine-tune numerous individual blocks of text and gave the book additional sharpness and focus.

Thanks also to the early access book readers and the students of our courses on ML system design, who challenged us with great questions and offered valuable suggestions.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to our families and friends, whose patience and understanding allowed us the time and focus needed to bring this book to life. Your unwavering support made this journey possible, and for that, we are deeply thankful.

Finally, a huge thank you to the Manning team for providing us with the opportunity to publish this book and for their guidance in every step of the process.