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

Join the Community:

https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn

Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter

MLOps Swag/Merch:

[https://shop.mlops.community/]

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/

~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~

Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore

Join our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]

Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)]

Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]

MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]

Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm

Connect with Varant on LinkedIn: /vzanoyan/

Connect with Nikhil on LinkedIn: /nikhilsimha/

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