Lightweight Recommendation Service

2024-10-27

Introduction

pairec-lite is a stripped-down version of Alibaba's pairec, with no external dependencies. This repo is more pedagogical than practical.

Here is how one bootstrap a service using pairec-lite.

Why use pairec in the first place?

• lack of resources. At first we have one and a half people to develop a recommendation service from scratch. It was not a priority feature.
• lack of experience. Most of the team has no ideas what a recommendation service is.
• possibility of throwaway software. Due to uncertainty of how long the product can survive, we may not need to pay the high interest rate from the technical debt of using a heavy framework.

Why should I use pairec instead of pairec-lite?

In most cases, you should not. I used it at work for several reason:

• pairec offers way more than what we use. The infra stack was simply AWS + Postgres, less than 5% of what pairec offers out-of-the-box.
• adapting pairec for other uses. These include: adapting pairec for search; embedding pairec into an existing web service; adding timeout control and streaming responses. Like all frameworks, doing things not the way it intends is a lot of work.
• stripping down dependencies. pairec and its transitive dependencies adds around 30MB after compilation.