Platform Engineering Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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 tha...

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 testin...

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 A...

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 p...

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 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...

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’l...

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 co...

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...

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 embe...

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 productio...

Ever wonder why strong Terraform modules still lead to long review queues and fragile pipelines? From hand-built scripts and early data center migrations to cloud sprawl and Kubernetes, configuration management has changed a lot - but the core struggle remains: too many decisions, not enough guardrails. Guest host Kelsey Hightower sits down with Cory O’Daniel to unpack where Infrastructure as Code...

Still freezing code before Black Friday and hoping nothing breaks? Feature flags can help you ship smaller, safer changes continuously—without the “big bang” risk or painful rollbacks. Cory O’Daniel talks with Unleash VP of Marketing Michael Ferranti about how modern teams use flags as a core delivery primitive alongside CI/CD and trunk-based development. They dig into kill switches for instant mi...

**UPDATE** - Apollo GraphQL has kindly offered us a few free passes to join them at the GraphQL Summit in San Francisco, October 6-8, 2025. If you are interested in going, the code is: PodcastSummit25 What if your API layer could help you ship faster today and make tomorrow’s AI workflows safer and easier to build? Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis explains how GraphQL became a practical standard for uni...

Ever wondered how many “perfect” candidates simply learned the test—or how many great engineers get filtered out by bad interview design? Mike Mroczka, interview coach and ex-Googler, shares what really goes on behind technical hiring and how to navigate it to your advantage. What you’ll learn: How leaked question banks and standardized puzzles can distort hiring signals - and where they still hel...

Is Postgres actually a better message queue than Kafka? This provocative question is just one of many insights Pete Hunt shares in this conversation about data orchestration, platform engineering, and the evolution of infrastructure. Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster Labs and former React co-founder at Facebook, brings his unique perspective from working at tech giants like Instagram and Twitter to discus...

Cloud lock-in isn't just about where your data lives—it's about how deeply cloud-specific code permeates your applications. Mark Fussell, co-creator of Dapr and CEO of Diagrid, joins Cory O'Daniel to explore how Dapr provides clean abstractions for common distributed system patterns, enabling teams to build portable applications without sacrificing cloud-native capabilities. The conversation cover...

Did you know that software engineers often "learn things the hard way" because they lack a standardized system to share knowledge about reliability issues? While security professionals have CVEs to catalog vulnerabilities, reliability engineers have been left to reinvent the wheel with each new bug or outage. Tony Meehan, co-founder and CTO of Prequel, introduces us to Common Reliability Enumerati...

What if you could turn a five-year software project into a one-month endeavor? Gene Kim, co-founder of IT Revolution and author of The Phoenix Project , reveals how AI-powered Vibe Coding is transforming the way developers work. Kim shares insights from his upcoming book about how developers are achieving unprecedented productivity, including how his co-author produces 12,000 lines of production-r...

Security often feels like a roadblock to developers, but what if it could be seamlessly integrated into the development process? As software delivery becomes increasingly automated and self-service, the traditional approach to security needs a major overhaul. Danny Allan, CTO at Snyk, shares practical insights on transforming security from a bottleneck into an enabler of developer productivity. Dr...

Are your platform teams constantly saying "no" to requests for new Kubernetes clusters? The traditional approach to Kubernetes multi-tenancy forces organizations to choose between cluster sprawl or restrictive namespaces - neither of which fully meets the needs of modern development teams. Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs, shares how vCluster is transforming the way organizations han...

When organizations grow beyond using third-party platforms, they face a critical challenge: how to build internal platforms that enable teams to work efficiently while maintaining security and compliance. Abby Bangser , founding principal engineer at Syntasso , shares insights on creating real-world platforms that strike the right balance between standardization and flexibility. Key Insights The s...