Varant Zanoyan is the Co-founder & CEO at Zipline AI, working on building a next-generation AI/ML infrastructure platform that streamlines data pipelines, model deployment, observability, and governance to accelerate enterprise AI development.

Nikhil Simha Raprolu is the Co-founder & CTO at Zipline AI, focused on architecting and scaling the company’s AI data platform — extending the open-source Chronon engine into a developer-friendly system that simplifies building and operating production AI applications.

Real-time features, AI search, Agentic similarities, Varant Zanoyan & Nikhil Simha Raprolu // MLOps Podcast #354

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// Abstract

Feature stores might be the wrong abstraction. Varant Zanoyan and Nikhil Simha Raprolu explain why Cronon ditched “store-first” thinking and focused on compute, orchestration, and real-time correctness—born at Airbnb, battle-tested with Stripe. If embeddings, agents, and real-time ML feel painful, this episode explains why.

// Related Links

Website: https://zipline.ai/

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Timestamps:

[00:00] Feature Platform Insights

[02:00] Zipline and Feature Stores

[05:19] Cronon and Zipline Origins

[10:49] Feast and Feather Comparison

[13:27] Open source challenges

[20:52] Zipline and Iceberg Integration

[23:54] Airbnb Agent Systems

[28:16] Features vs Embeddings

[29:07] Wrap up