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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And huge thanks to Chroma for hosting us in their recording studio
// 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
