The concept of providers has been in feast since the early days, but the latest versions of feast have barely any use for it. There are 4 providers in the project: local, aws, gcp and azure (contrib), all of which extend passthrough provider. All of them except for aws don't make any meaningful changes to the parent functionality. aws provider adds an additional logic that manages the deployment of feature server to aws lambda.

The primary reason why providers have become irrelevant is that most of the components that they provide are extensible, configurable and pluggable anyway. For example, there's no point specifying gcp as a provider when the user still has to separately configure all relevant components (online_store, offline_store) separately. I think it can in fact be more confusing to users because setting provider as gcp and choosing aws technologies as offline and online stores still function exactly the same as with an aws provider.

Another use case for providers was supposed to be that some choices for online/offline store selection would be made for the user by default, but this also doesn't make much sense as in virtually all scenarios (except sometimes maybe for local) the user still has to configure these individual components to provide additional information (e.g. aws region, names for the service instances and so on).

I think we should start phasing out all usage of providers and eventually remove them from the codebase and docs. The only functionality aws provider provides right now (aws lambda) can easily be made available without restricting it to a single provider.