Platform Engineering Playbook Podcast

The Linux Foundation announced the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) on December 9, 2025, bringing together AWS, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Block, Cloudflare, and Bloomberg. This episode breaks down MCP (Model Context Protocol) - the "HTTP for AI" with 97M+ monthly downloads. 📰 NEWS: Docker hardened images now free, MongoBleed CVE patch alert, Cloudflare "Fail Small" resilience plan, DORA m...

FinOps is becoming an essential skill for platform engineers in 2026. This episode provides a complete guide to the skills, certifications, and tools you need to add cloud cost management to your platform engineering toolkit. 📰 News Segment: • GPG.fail documents 14 critical GnuPG vulnerabilities - check your signing tools • MongoBleed CVE-2025-14847: Critical MongoDB exploit - patch immediately •...

Platform engineers are commanding $172K-$207K in 2026, a 13-27% premium over DevOps roles. This episode breaks down salary benchmarks from Dice, Motion Recruitment, and Levels.fyi, revealing which skills are S-tier ($200K+) and which are table stakes. We cover: - Platform Engineer vs DevOps salary gap (13-27% premium) - S-tier skills: LLM/GenAI ($195K-$312K), Platform Engineering, DevSecOps, MLOps...

The series finale of our five-part Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series. We synthesize everything from agentic AI operations, mainstream adoption, developer experience metrics, and boring Kubernetes into ten concrete predictions for 2026. Learn what to invest in versus ignore, and discover our 2026 platform engineering thesis. In this episode: - High confidence predictions: IDP market con...

The best thing happening to Kubernetes in 2026 is that it's becoming boring. After a decade of explosive innovation, Kubernetes is entering its "mature infrastructure" phase - stable, predictable, and increasingly invisible. Like Linux and PostgreSQL before it, boring Kubernetes enables platform teams to build abstractions without worrying about breaking changes. Part of the Platform Engineering 2...

DORA metrics revolutionized how we measure DevOps performance, but they have a critical blind spot: they tell you how your delivery pipeline is performing, but not how your people are doing. This episode explores the SPACE framework, DX Core 4, cognitive load measurement, and the HEART framework for platform teams. Part of the Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series. In this episode: - DORA...

Episode 2 of our 5-part "Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series" examines the macro trend: platform engineering crossing the chasm to mainstream adoption. Gartner predicts 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform teams by 2026. The CNPE certification launched at KubeCon 2025. But there's a 56% talent gap and nearly half of initiatives run on under $1M annually. We addres...

Episode 1 of our 5-part "Platform Engineering 2026 Look Forward Series" tackles the hottest debate in platform engineering: will AI agents replace us or amplify us? AWS Frontier Agents can reason across 30+ steps. The MLOps market hits $129 billion by 2028. Netflix AI triage cuts MTTR by 40%. But where are the hard limits? We introduce the 60/30/10 Framework: - 60% Delegate: Log analysis, runbook...

The CNPE (Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer) exam launched November 11, 2025 at KubeCon Atlanta, becoming the first hands-on platform engineering certification in five years. This deep dive covers exam format, all five domains, and a complete study guide. Key Points: • CNPE is hands-on: 17 tasks in 2 hours, 64% pass score • Five domains: GitOps/CD (25%), Platform APIs (25%), Observability (...

Kubernetes 1.35 "Timbernetes" dropped on December 17, 2025, fundamentally changing how we operate clusters. This deep dive covers the 60 enhancements, 3 breaking changes that will bite you if unprepared, and in-place pod resize graduating to GA after six years of development. What You'll Learn: • Breaking Changes: cgroup v1 REMOVED (not deprecated), containerd 1.x EOL, IPVS deprecated • In-Place P...

No more copy-paste configs. No more manual state management. Terraform just went component-based. HashiCorp released native monorepo support and Terraform Stacks to GA on September 25, 2025. This is the biggest architectural shift since Terraform modules. Instead of directory-per-environment with duplicate configurations, you define components once and deploy multiple times with isolated state. We...

Supply chain attacks cost $60 billion in 2025. Docker just made the solution free. On December 17, Docker released 1,000+ hardened container images under Apache 2.0—previously a paid offering. Independent penetration testing by SRLabs confirmed 95% CVE reduction and found NO root escapes or container breakouts. These images use distroless runtime: no shell, no package manager, no attack surface. W...

Kubernetes 1.35 is here, and it changes everything about pod lifecycle management. In this episode, we break down the release that finally lets you scale pods without restarting them. In This Episode: - In-Place Pod Vertical Scaling goes GA - adjust CPU/memory without pod restarts - Breaking changes: cgroup v1 removed, containerd 1.x EOL, IPVS deprecated - Pod Certificates (beta) for native worklo...

Netflix reduced their deployment failures by 40,000x using Temporal. In this episode, we break down how they achieved this remarkable improvement and what it means for your platform engineering practice. In This Episode: - Netflix's deployment reliability problem: 4% failure rate from transient cloud operations - What is durable execution? Write code as if failures don't exist - Temporal vs AWS St...

48% of Kubernetes users struggle with tool choice. That's nearly half of us paralyzed by options. So when AWS adopted kro alongside Argo CD, we had to ask: is this the Goldilocks solution we've been waiting for? In this episode, Jordan and Alex tackle the composition tool landscape with an honest decision framework. We dive deep into CEL expressions, resource graph mechanics, and GitOps integratio...

2025 was the year platform engineering grew up—and got a reality check. AI entered infrastructure in ways we couldn't ignore. Industry consensus finally emerged on what platforms should actually do. And Cloudflare went down six times to remind us that concentration risk isn't just theoretical. In this special year-in-review episode, we look back at the ten stories that defined platform engineering...

In five years, Okta scaled Auth0's private cloud from 12 to 1,000+ Kubernetes clusters using ArgoCD. At KubeCon 2025, engineers Jérémy Albuixech and Kahou Lei shared their hard-won lessons. This episode breaks down the challenges, solutions, and practical wisdom for scaling GitOps to enterprise levels. Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00058-okta-gitops-argocd-100...

Ninety percent of organizations now have platform teams, but most just renamed their ops team and expected different results. This episode breaks down the team sizes, reporting structures, and interaction patterns backed by DORA 2025 data that separate successful platform teams from glorified ticket handlers. Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00057-platform-engine...

HashiCorp (now IBM) has officially archived the CDK for Terraform project, ending a five-year experiment in programmatic infrastructure-as-code. Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00056-cdktf-deprecated-iac-migration In this episode, we break down: - Why CDKTF failed to find product-market fit (243K downloads vs Pulumi's 1.1M) - The four key factors behind the depr...

🎧 AUDIODOCS: Official documentation of popular open-source projects, adapted and narrated for audio. Learn while commuting, exercising, or doing chores. Stop juggling terminal windows to tail Kubernetes logs. stern lets you tail multiple pods and containers simultaneously with regex queries, auto-detection of new pods, and color-coded output. This episode covers everything from basic usage to adv...

🎧 AUDIODOCS: Official documentation of popular open-source projects, adapted and narrated for audio. Learn while commuting, exercising, or doing chores. Master CoreDNS, the default DNS server for Kubernetes clusters. This 72-minute episode covers the complete v1.13.1 documentation - from plugin architecture to production configuration. Every time a pod looks up a service, every time kubectl exec...

🎧 AUDIODOCS: Official documentation of popular open-source projects, adapted and narrated for audio. Learn while commuting, exercising, or doing chores. Stop typing long kubectl config commands! kubectx and kubens are essential CLI tools that let you switch Kubernetes contexts and namespaces instantly with tab completion and fuzzy search. This 10-minute episode covers everything you need to know...

Part 4 of 4 in our AWS re:Invent 2025 series (finale). The data and AI services that tie everything together. S3 Tables with Apache Iceberg hits GA with Intelligent-Tiering and cross-region replication. Aurora DSQL delivers distributed SQL with GPS atomic clocks. S3 Vectors supports 2 billion vectors at 90% lower cost. Clean Rooms ML enables privacy-enhanced synthetic datasets. Plus a comprehensiv...

Part 3 of our AWS re:Invent 2025 series. AWS transforms Kubernetes into an AI infrastructure platform with massive scale and AI-native operations. In this episode: - EKS Ultra Scale: 100,000 nodes per cluster (vs 15K GKE, 5K AKS)—1.6 million Trainium accelerators or 800K GPUs in a single cluster - AWS replaced etcd's Raft consensus with their internal "journal" system and moved to in-memory storag...

AWS re:Invent 2025 Series (Part 2 of 4) AWS announces Graviton5 with 192 cores (3x previous gen) and 40% better price-performance vs x86. Trainium 3 delivers 4.4x performance at 50% lower cost, with NeuronLink eliminating 50% network overhead. Lambda Durable Functions enable year-long workflows. Werner Vogels introduces the "Renaissance Developer" framework for the AI era. Plus: BellSoft's hardene...