1729594542
Platform Engineering Podcast

Advertise on podcast: Platform Engineering Podcast

Rating
★★★★★
5
from
5 reviews
This podcast has
52 episodes
Language
English
Date created
2024/02/07
Latest episode
2026/07/15
Average duration
47 min.
Release period
20 days

Description

The Platform Engineering Podcast is a show about the real work of building and running internal platforms — hosted by Cory O’Daniel, longtime infrastructure and software engineer, and CEO/cofounder of Massdriver. Each episode features candid conversations with the engineers, leads, and builders shaping platform engineering today. Topics range from org structure and team ownership to infrastructure design, developer experience, and the tradeoffs behind every “it depends.” Cory brings two decades of experience building platforms — and now spends his time thinking about how teams scale infrastructure without creating bottlenecks or burning out ops. This podcast isn’t about trends. It’s about how platform engineering actually works inside real companies. Whether you're deep into Terraform/OpenTofu modules, building golden paths, or just trying to keep your platform from becoming a dumpster fire — you’ll probably find something useful here.

Unlock Platform Engineering Podcast podcast Email contact info,
Listeners & Audience details

Email contact information

Direct podcast contact details

Listeners

Audience numbers & engagement insights

Audience details

Podcast Insights

Podcast episodes

Check latest episodes from Platform Engineering Podcast podcast


Taking a Summer Break: What Would You Like To Hear This Fall?
2026/07/15
We're hitting pause for the summer on new episodes of the Platform Engineering Podcast, but don’t worry, we’ve got some great episodes in the feed to keep you entertained in the meantime. If you’ve got suggestions for guests or topics, please reach out — I’m always eager to annoy people into joining the conversation! Can’t wait to reconnect with you all soon!
What Do Service Meshes Actually Solve? (William Morgan, Buoyant/Linkerd)
2026/06/24
Network calls fail in ways function calls never do - and once a monolith becomes microservices, reliability problems show up fast: retries amplify load, latency spikes cascade, and “what talks to what?” becomes hard to answer. William Morgan, co-creator of Linkerd and the person who coined “service mesh,” breaks down what service meshes actually solve for platform teams running Kubernetes at scale. The conversation focuses on practical outcomes: improving reliability between services, getting uniform observability without rewriting every app, and handling gaps Kubernetes doesn’t cover well - like gRPC/HTTP2 load balancing and cross-environment communication. Key topics Why reliability is the first “microservices tax” (timeouts, retries, backoff, cascading failure)What Kubernetes does not solve at the networking layer—and where a service mesh fitsgRPC/HTTP2 load balancing problems and why L4 balancing can fall shortService-to-service visibility: understanding traffic flows and performance without per-app instrumentationCost and resilience tradeoffs with multi-AZ Kubernetes on AWS (and how zonal-aware balancing can help)Whether developers should ever need to interact with service mesh configurationWhere zero trust and policy controls belong: platform guardrails vs application ownership Guest: William Morgan, CEO at Buoyant, Co-Creator of Linkerd William Morgan brings a unique take on platform engineering, security, and traffic management in cloud native environments. William’s the mind behind Linkerd, the CNCF graduate service mesh born to make security, observability, and reliability "just work" for modern apps without all that heavy overhead. With roots as an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he was hands-on in the shift to microservices, and experience at Microsoft, Powerset, Adap.tv, and MITRE, William understands operational complexity better than most. His perspective on reducing unpredictable cloud spend with features like Linkerd’s High Availability Zonal Load Balancing is timely for any team wrestling with multi-AZ cloud bills. William has hands-on knowledge of MCP, the protocol now critical for securing enterprise AI traffic. He also has strong views on sustainable open source business models, having contributed to open source for over 20 years. William Morgan, BlueSky Buoyant, Website Buoyant, LinkedIn Buoyant, YouTube Linkerd, GitHub Links to interesting things from this episode: The Service Mesh Landscape
Continuous Integration at Agentic Velocity with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber
2026/06/10
When code gets cheaper to produce, feedback becomes the limiting factor - CI, reviews, and the handoffs between tools can quietly slow everything down. Rob Zuber breaks down what platform engineers are seeing as teams adopt AI-assisted development: more branch builds, new failure modes, and growing pressure to shorten the loop between “change made” and “change validated.” He focuses on how CI can evolve from a human-first dashboard into a system that agents can interact with directly through APIs, CLIs, and MCP-style interfaces - so fixes can happen faster and with less waiting on manual triage. Along the way, Rob and Cory dig into practical questions engineering leaders are wrestling with: how PR review becomes the next major bottleneck, what “agent experience” means in a delivery pipeline, why speed isn’t only about faster compute (it’s also about doing less unnecessary work), and how teams can share learnings so “agentic velocity” doesn’t only benefit a few power users. If you’re building or running the systems that ship software, this is a clear look at where CI fits in an AI-accelerated workflow, and what needs to change to keep delivery safe, fast, and sustainable. Guest: Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups, a four-time founder, and three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 300+ engineers who are distributed around the globe. CircleCI, Website CircleCI, LinkedIn CircleCI, GitHub Links to interesting things from this episode: “The Confident Commit” podcast Wardley Mapping“How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code.”
Durable Execution for Real‑World Failures with Temporal’s Cornelia Davis
2026/05/27
A lot of infrastructure and automation fails for ordinary reasons: rate limits, flaky networks, partial permissions, long-running jobs, and retries that vanish when the process restarts. Durable execution is a way to design systems that keep going anyway - without rebuilding a maze of queues, cron jobs, and manual cleanup. Cornelia Davis breaks down how durable execution works in practice: writing “normal” code while the runtime provides durable retries, state management, and the ability to pause work, wait for a human or external change (like a quota increase), and resume right where things left off. The conversation connects these ideas to platform engineering realities - Terraform workflows, long provisioning times, and “orphan” resources - and explains how Temporal workflows and activities help teams model failure handling as a first-class part of the system. You’ll also hear why this approach is showing up in AI engineering: long-running agent workflows, frequent rate limiting, and the need to avoid re-running expensive LLM calls when something breaks near the end. Guest: Cornelia Davis, Developer Advocate at Temporal Technologies and author of “Cloud Native Patterns” Cornelia Davis is a Developer Advocate at Temporal, where she brings more than three decades of experience as a software technologist to help engineers build resilient, scalable systems. Known for her pragmatic blend of hands-on coding, technical strategy, and customer collaboration, Cornelia is passionate about helping developers unlock the full potential of modern cloud-native architectures. Previously, she served as VP of Technology at Pivotal, where she played a key role in shaping Cloud Foundry and enabling enterprise cloud transformations. Whether she’s writing code, presenting at conferences, or whiteboarding with teams, Cornelia is driven by a singular goal: empowering developers to build better software. Outside of tech, she recharges on the yoga mat or in the kitchen, where she brings the same creativity and focus to her practice. Temporal, Website Temporal, GitHub Temporal Community, GitHub Temporal’s AI-assisted development tools Links to interesting things from this episode: Temporal Developer Skill“Cloud Native Patterns” by Cornelia Davis
You Need AI Sysadmins Can Trust, With Cribl's Nikhil Mungel
2026/05/13
What happens when a non-deterministic AI system is asked to touch production telemetry or generate changes for an SRE pipeline? The cost of being “close enough” can be lost data, downtime, or a security incident. Cribl’s Nikhil Mungel joins Cory to break down what it takes to build AI that sysadmins can actually trust. The conversation digs into harness engineering and the practical guardrails that turn probabilistic models into repeatable, verifiable outcomes. They cover why breaking work into small chunks matters, how validation and testing become the real leverage point for AI-native development, and what “code factories” mean for review, CI, and platform reliability when teams can generate a thousand PRs an hour. Platform engineers will also hear a pragmatic take on the future of the job. The focus shifts away from typing code and toward building systems for verification, simulation, and safe deployment at scale, plus clearer ways to decide what needs human scrutiny and what can ship automatically. Guest: Nikhil Mungel, Head of AI R&D at Cribl Nikhil Mungel is the Head of AI R&D at Cribl, where he's building LLM-powered systems for IT and Security data transformation and analysis. Before Cribl, he spent over a decade developing distributed systems across the observability and consumer social tech landscape. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids. His current focus is applying AI to make complex infrastructure more intuitive and explainable. Nikhil Mungel, Website Nikhil Mungel, X Cribl, Website Cribl, LinkedIn Links to interesting things from this episode: Cribl Guard“Open source died in March. It just doesn't know it yet.” by Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard
Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer
2026/04/15
When a flaky test can stall a merge queue, “just rerun CI” stops scaling fast. Cory talks with Trunk co-founder and CEO Eli Schleifer about the outer loop problems that show up as teams ship more code - especially with AI-assisted development increasing PR volume. They break down what a merge queue is, why logical merge conflicts happen even when individual PRs are green, and how predictive testing helps protect main without forcing constant retesting. Eli also explains how Trunk approaches flaky tests: collecting JUnit results, using quarantines so known flakes don’t block delivery, and fingerprinting failures to tell the difference between “this always times out” and “this was just broken by a recent change.” The conversation closes on how review and quality practices may shift as code generation accelerates - and what still needs strong guardrails like tests, security checks, and reliable CI signals. Guest: Eli Schleifer, co-founder and CEO of Trunk Eli Schleifer leads Trunk’s technical vision and product strategy, focused on closing the gap between AI-speed code generation and human-speed delivery by removing the bottlenecks that slow modern engineering teams. Trunk’s platform eliminates flaky tests, resolves merge queue constraints, and redesigns CI systems to enable high-throughput, continuous delivery. Prior to founding Trunk, Eli was CTO at Directr, which was acquired by Google, and has served in engineering leadership roles at YouTube, Uber, and Microsoft. Eli Schleifer, X Trunk, website Trunk, Slack Trunk, Github Trunk, X Links to interesting things from this episode: Balsamiq“Code First Engineering” by Eli Schleifer
AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins
2026/04/01
What happens when your “coworker” can generate code and changes faster than your team can review them, and production still has to stay up? William Collins breaks down what AI-Native Ops looks like when you take reliability seriously: where reasoning should stop, where deterministic automation should begin, and how guardrails like compliance checks, version pinning, and controlled workflows keep AI from turning into outage fuel. Cory and William also dig into why context windows and tool sprawl matter in real systems, how protocols like MCP and agent-to-agent communication are shaping day-to-day automation, and why regulated environments can’t adopt new tech with hype-driven shortcuts. If you’re a platform engineer trying to balance speed with safety, this conversation offers a practical way to use AI for the work that drags teams down, without giving up operational discipline. Guest: William Collins, Director of Technical Evangelism at Itential, AWS community builder, and the co-host of the Cloud Gambit podcast William Collins is a strategic thinker and catalyst for innovation. Over his career, he has helped enterprises build large-scale networks, driven modernization through cloud adoption, and excels at optimizing complex environments through good design practices and automation. Today, William works as Director of Technical Evangelism for Itential, where he focuses on evangelizing the Itential Platform, fostering strong relationships with customers to fully realize their goals, engaging with community, and advocating for the successful future of network, security, and automation infrastructure. As a content creator, William hosts The Cloud Gambit Podcast with Eyvonne Sharp, a show that unravels the state of cloud computing, markets, strategy, and emerging trends with industry experts. He is also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor (Automation, Cloud, and Network Engineering Content), AWS Community Builder (Network & Content Delivery), and is a group organizer for the USNUA - Kentucky User Group (KYNUG). Prior to Itential, William worked as a Principal Cloud Architect and Director of Technical Evangelism for Alkira where he helped grow the company from lean beginnings to being ranked 25th Fastest-Growing Company in North America and 6th in the Bay Area on the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. He also held various senior technical roles across the enterprise space in Financial Services and Healthcare, most recently at Humana as Director of Cloud Architecture. Outside of tech, his time is spent with family, woodworking, ice hockey, and guitar. Opinions expressed are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer. William Collins, Blog William Collins, YouTube William Collins, X William Collins, Instagram William Collins, TikTok William Collins, GitHub Itential “The Cloud Gambit” podcast Links to interesting things from this episode: Ghostty“Harness design for long-running application development” by Anthropic
Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron
2026/03/18
Terraform drift, state wrangling, and a growing “tools for tools” stack are still daily work for many platform teams - despite a decade of DevOps talk and cloud maturity. Why does ops automation so often feel like it needs babysitting? Pavlo Baron breaks down where Infrastructure as Code tends to break down in real organizations: manual drift management, low-level state complexity, and a lack of practical abstractions that let developers self-serve without inheriting the entire ops burden. The conversation digs into what a more use-case-driven approach could look like - where teams can choose when to enforce desired state, when to accept emergency changes, and how to build “guardrails” that reduce mistakes without slowing delivery. Pavlo also explains why type safety and constrained interfaces matter (especially as AI starts generating more code and infrastructure changes), and why the future of platform engineering depends less on slogans and more on systems that reduce toil. Guest: Pavlo Baron, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs Pavlo Baron is Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, who are crafting tools to remove the toil from the operations work, with a current focus on infrastructure. He is a veteran in the space, having served in all kinds of roles throughout his career that spans more than 35 years. Previously, he was co-founder, CTO, and major inventor at an observability startup, Instana, that was acquired by IBM in 2020. Pavlo is a frequent conference speaker and author of several books. Pavlo Baron, X https://pavlobaron.medium.com/ https://github.com/platform-engineering-labs https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-labs https://x.com/plateng_labs https://bsky.app/profile/platform.engineering https://mastodon.social/@plateng_labs https://www.youtube.com/@plateng-labs Links to interesting things from this episode: The Pkl Primerformaeformae quick start"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"“Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.” Albert BanduraJPL “Visions of the Future”“Fallout: New Vegas”
Why Extend Went All-In on Serverless Platform Engineering
2026/03/04
Billions of requests a month on AWS Lambda can cost less than a single engineer’s laptop budget, but only if the architecture and developer workflow are designed for it. Justin Masse, Senior Platform DevOps Engineer at Extend, shares how Extend committed early to a serverless-first approach and built a platform that prioritizes developer speed and low operational toil. The conversation breaks down what it takes to run active-active, multi-region systems in a serverless world, how the team keeps services small and fast, and why asynchronous, event-driven design changes both reliability and cost. You’ll also hear how Extend treats developer experience as a core platform responsibility: templated microservices, fast deployment pipelines, ephemeral environments for pull requests, and infrastructure that developers can own without becoming cloud specialists. A big theme is using AWS CDK and internal abstractions to keep infrastructure close to the application code, so teams can move quickly while keeping platform standards consistent. Finally, the discussion gets practical about tradeoffs that show up after the “serverless is easy” pitch: local development challenges, the real cost center (observability), and where AI is helping today, including an internal agent that diagnoses failed deployments and suggests fixes. What you’ll learn Why Extend avoids servers and VPC complexity, and what they use insteadPatterns for active-active, multi-region thinking in a serverless architectureHow DevEx practices like templates and ephemeral environments reduce frictionA pragmatic approach to IaC with CDK and reusable internal constructsWhere serverless costs stay low, and why observability often dominates the billHow AI is being applied to platform workflows without skipping engineering judgment Guest: Jusin Masse, Senior Platform DevOps Engineer at Extend Justin Masse is a self-proclaimed lead chaos engineer, recognized within niche engineering communities for his expertise Chaos Engineering and Infrastructure & DevOps. The father of three young kids, a husband, a recent MBA graduate, recent cancer survivor, and competitive powerlifter, he still finds time to actively contribute to the platform engineering community. Justin Masse, website Justin Masse, GitHub Extend, website Links to interesting things from this episode: Episode with Adrian Cockroft“From $erverless to Elixir” by Cory O’Daniel
Observability in the AI Era with New Relic's Nic Benders
2026/02/18
What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challenge: operating systems without experts to consult. Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic, has spent 15 years watching observability evolve from basic server monitoring to understanding complex distributed systems. Now he's tackling the next frontier: how to maintain and operate software when there's no human author to ask why something was built a certain way. The conversation covers the shift from instrumentation being the hard problem to understanding being the bottleneck. Nic explains why inventory matters more than you think, how to approach AI-generated code as a black box that needs testing and telemetry, and why "garbage in, safety out" should be your new mantra. You'll learn practical strategies for instrumenting modern systems with OpenTelemetry, why your observability hierarchy needs to start with knowing what's actually running, and how to build platforms that make safe deployment easier than risky shortcuts. Nic also shares his perspective on technical drift versus technical debt and what changes when your best troubleshooting tool - institutional knowledge - no longer exists. Whether you're drowning in observability data or just starting to instrument your systems, this conversation offers concrete approaches for building understanding into your platform engineering practice. Guest: Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic Nic Benders is New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist. Part of the Engineering team since the early days of the company, Nic has been involved with everything from Agents to ZooKeeper and all the pieces and products in between. As New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist, he now looks after the long-term technical strategy behind the product and the experience of all the engineering teams who build it. Before New Relic, he worked in the mobile space, managing back-end messaging and commerce systems powering some of the largest carriers in the world. New Relic, website New Relic, Blog Links to interesting things from this episode: OpenClaw (aka Moltbot, aka Clawdbot)Moltbook
Simplicity at Scale: Cleaning House for Platform Teams with Brian Childress
2025/12/17
Why do so many “modern” platforms feel slow, fragile, and painful to work on? Platform engineer and fractional CTO Brian Childress joins Cory to discuss how over-engineering, resume‑driven development, and scattered tooling quietly block teams from shipping value. They explore why simplicity is a competitive advantage for platform teams, especially as AI becomes part of everyday development. You’ll learn: How to design a simple platform MVP that developers actually like usingWhat a good local‑to‑prod story looks like (and why it’s the real scaling superpower)Practical ways to onboard humans and AI tools so both can contribute fasterWhere teams introduce unnecessary complexity with Kubernetes, microservices, and NoSQLHow to think about scaling in three dimensions: users, developers, and featuresWhy good architecture, docs, and decision records make AI more useful, not lessHow to spot and avoid resume‑driven development before it explodes your platform Whether you’re cleaning up a messy stack or trying to keep a young platform from drifting into chaos, this conversation gives you concrete patterns for keeping things simple while still scaling teams, systems, and features. Guest: Brian Childress, Platform engineer and fractional CTO Brian Childress is an accomplished Software Engineer, Architect and Fractional CTO. For over a decade Brian has developed applications in healthcare, finance, and consumer products. Brian has spoken internationally on topics such as application security and developer tooling. Brian spends his free time researching and teaching the latest in application and API security design and best practices. Brian Childress, website Brian Childress, X Links to interesting things from this episode: ReplitLovable
Using Feature Flags to Tame Complexity with Mike Zorn
2025/12/03
What if changing a single flag could save you from a failed migration, a broken API, or a late-night rollback? Join us as we dive into how feature flags become a practical tool for changing application behavior at runtime, not just toggling UI elements. Cory talks Mike Zorn about real stories from LaunchDarkly and Rippling, covering how teams use flags to ship safely, debug faster, and simplify complex systems. You’ll hear about: Using feature flags to avoid staging overload and ship directly to productionMigrating critical systems and databases with minimal downtime and riskControlling log levels and rate limits for specific customers on the flyManaging flag sprawl so teams do not drown in half-rolled-out featuresExperimenting with AI features, prompts, and models without fully committing If you’re working on a platform, running critical infrastructure, or just trying to ship faster without breaking everything, this conversation offers concrete patterns you can start using right away. Guest: Mike Zorn, Senior Software Engineer at Rippling Mike’s software engineering journey began with an early interest in problem-solving and programming, starting with creating programs on a TI-83 calculator in middle school. After studying mathematics in college, he transitioned into software through an applied math project that required coding, which sparked his interest in engineering as a career. Professionally, he has worked at several product and SaaS companies, including one that was an early LaunchDarkly customer, where they experienced firsthand the challenges of managing feature flags internally. That experience led him to appreciate the value of tools like LaunchDarkly, eventually joining the company himself. Since then, he has contributed across various areas, including focusing on how LaunchDarkly can best adopt its own platform internally to streamline releases and help engineers work more efficiently. His latest adventure has been joining Rippling as a Senior Staff Software Engineer. Mike Zorn, GitHub Mike Zorn, Email Rippling LaunchDarkly Links to interesting things from this episode: SigNozSignadotOpen Container Initiative“Using Feature Flags to Avoid Downtime During Migrations”Apache Iceberg
Policy as Code: Kyverno and Securing Kubernetes at Scale with Jim Bugwadia
2025/11/19
Most Kubernetes security breaches don't come from zero-day exploits - they come from misconfigurations. While your team runs scanners and reviews reports, containers are already running as root, network policies are missing, and compliance violations are piling up across dozens of repositories. Jim Bugwadia, co-founder and CEO of Nirmata and creator of Kyverno, joins Cory to talk about a different approach: policy as code. Instead of asking developers to remember security best practices across every repo, what if your cluster automatically enforced secure defaults and blocked non-compliant deployments before they ever reached production? You'll learn how to start using Kyverno today without breaking your production environment - from running your first audit scan (no installation required) to implementing enforcement mode with exceptions. Jim explains why micro-segmentation matters more than ever, how to automate network policies for every namespace, and why platform teams are using Kyverno for everything from security to cost optimization. Whether you're running one cluster or managing Kubernetes at scale, this conversation offers practical strategies for making security a byproduct of your platform - not an afterthought. Topics covered: Why shift-left security fails and what "shift-down" means for platform teamsHow to implement Kubernetes policy enforcement without grinding deployments to a haltAutomating secure defaults: network policies, resource quotas, and role bindingsThe crawl-walk-run approach to rolling out policies in existing clustersReal-world use cases beyond security: cost optimization and resource management Guest: Jim Bugwadia, Co-Founder & CEO of Nirmata and creator of Kyverno Jim Bugwadia is the Co-founder and CEO of Nirmata, a Kubernetes management platform built for enterprises to simplify and scale cloud-native operations across clouds, data centers, edge, and connected devices. With a mission to democratize cloud-native best practices, Jim brings deep expertise in building large-scale software products and leading high-performing teams. Before founding Nirmata, he led a global consulting team at Cisco, guiding enterprises and service providers on their cloud computing journeys. Earlier in his career, he contributed to innovative products at startups and major companies including Trapeze Networks, Pano Logic, Jetstream, Lucent, and Motorola. A hands-on technologist, Jim continues to code in Go, Java, and JavaScript, reflecting his passion for building in the rapidly evolving world of software. Jim Bugwadia, X Nirmata Kyverno Links to interesting things from this episode: Kyverno Community Repository“Shift-Down Security” PaperOpenReportsPolicy Reporter“The Shai-Hulud npm malware attack: A wake-up call for supply chain security”Kyverno Slack Channel
Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Beyond Pipelines: Infrastructure As Data
2025/11/05
Is your Git repo really the source of truth for infrastructure - or just a suggestion? Guest host Kelsey Hightower sits down with Cory O’Daniel to unpack why many teams hit dead ends with CI/CD for provisioning, where GitOps struggles with drift, and when TicketOps helps or hurts. They explore a different model: infrastructure as data with typed contracts, shared artifacts, and workflows that embed policy, validation, and upgrades from the start. You’ll hear practical ways to reduce cognitive load for developers while giving operations reliable control and better day‑2 levers. You’ll learn: Why pipelines are a poor fit for infra provisioning and what to do insteadHow to reason about drift as a three‑way merge with realityWhen reconciliation helps, and when it breaks production firefightsHow typed contracts and artifacts connect modules and teams without glue scriptsWays to present safer self‑service without requiring everyone to learn TerraformA simple mental model for treating TicketOps as a surface, not the workflow Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Prior to his retirement, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. He is a strong open source advocate with a focus on building great software as well as great communities around them. He is also an accomplished author and keynote speaker with a knack for demystifying complex topics, doing live demos and enabling others to succeed. When he is not writing code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration. Guest: Cory O'Daniel, CEO and Co-Founder of Massdriver and Co-Founder of OpenTofu Cory has been a software architect and engineer for 20 years, leading up to the founding of MassDriver. He's also a husband and the father of two kids. Cory O'Daniel, X Cory O'Daniel, Medium Massdriver, website Massdriver, GitHub Massdriver, Youtube Open Tofu Links to interesting things from this episode: "Gitopscracy" video
Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Are CI/CD and GitOps Just Making Things Harder?
2025/10/22
What if your production environment had a live, trustworthy blueprint you could zoom in and out of on demand? Kelsey Hightower guest-hosts a candid conversation with Cory about why CI/CD pipelines and GitOps often break down for cloud infrastructure. They explore a simpler operational model: treat infrastructure as data, lean on clear checkpoints instead of rigid “golden paths,” and make production legible for both developers and ops. You’ll learn: Where CI/CD adds friction for infra and what to do insteadWhy GitOps works for apps but hits limits for databases, networks, and multi-region realitiesHow “living diagrams” help new teammates understand prod on day onePractical guardrails that evolve with your org without locking teams inWays to reduce drift, surprise cloud costs, and Day Two chaosA mindset shift: databases for ops data, not shell-script archaeology Walk away with concrete patterns to make production understandable, auditable, and easier to change—without more YAML or bigger pipelines. Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Prior to his retirement, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Cloud Platform. He is a strong open source advocate with a focus on building great software as well as great communities around them. He is also an accomplished author and keynote speaker with a knack for demystifying complex topics, doing live demos and enabling others to succeed. When he is not writing code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration. Guest: Cory O'Daniel, CEO and Co-Founder of Massdriver and Co-Founder of OpenTofu Cory has been a software architect and engineer for 20 years, leading up to the founding of MassDriver. He's also a husband and the father of two kids. Cory O'Daniel, X Cory O'Daniel, Medium Massdriver, website Massdriver, GitHub Massdriver, Youtube Open Tofu Links to interesting things from this episode: SigNoz“The $6,459 Terraform Lesson: Why Infrastructure Lifecycle Monitoring Matters” by Liz Fong-Jones "Gitopscracy" video

Podcast reviews

Read Platform Engineering Podcast podcast reviews


5 out of 5
5 reviews
★★★★★
Seth-Philly 2024/07/19
Fantastic podcast!
Best show on cloud infrastructure and platform engineering yet!
check all reviews on apple podcasts

Podcast sponsorship advertising

Start advertising on Platform Engineering Podcast relevant audience podcasts


What do you want to promote?