Podcast · Tech & Science
by Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver · English · Tech & Science
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…
15 Jul 2026 · 3 min
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!
E51 · 24 Jun 2026 · 56 min
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 -…
E50 · 10 Jun 2026 · 50 min
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…
E49 · 27 May 2026 · 46 min
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…
E48 · 13 May 2026 · 55 min
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…
E47 · 15 Apr 2026 · 50 min
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…
E46 · 1 Apr 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
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…
E45 · 18 Mar 2026 · 58 min
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…
E44 · 4 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 2 min
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…
E43 · 18 Feb 2026 · 51 min
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…
E42 · 17 Dec 2025 · 41 min
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 using What a good local‑to‑prod story looks like (and why it’s the real scaling superpower) Practical ways to onboard…
E41 · 3 Dec 2025 · 43 min
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 production Migrating critical systems and databases with minimal downtime and risk Controlling…
E40 · 19 Nov 2025 · 42 min
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…
E39 · 5 Nov 2025 · 49 min
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:…
E38 · 22 Oct 2025 · 30 min
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 instead Why GitOps works for apps but hits limits for databases, networks, and multi-region…
E37 · 8 Oct 2025 · 40 min
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 succeeds and where teams get stuck. What you’ll learn: How to avoid “choice overload” in cloud configs by moving decisions upstream Practical ways to pair IaC with UX, policies, and SLAs to reduce…
E36 · 24 Sep 2025 · 44 min
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 mitigation, progressive rollouts tied to real metrics, and why homegrown “if-statement” systems turn into hidden platforms you didn’t mean to build. They also cover the rising volume of AI‑assisted…
E35 · 10 Sep 2025 · 43 min
**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 unifying messy backends, why declarative schemas and strong types are the “bedrock” for agentic systems, and where MCP fits when you want agents to call business data safely. You’ll hear real examples…
E34 · 20 Aug 2025 · 1 hr 9 min
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 help Practical ways companies can make interviews fairer and harder to game, both on-site and remote A balanced take on data structures and algorithms: when they’re useful and when they’re noise…
E33 · 30 Jul 2025 · 50 min
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 discuss how different platform team approaches impact product development. Having witnessed both Facebook's clear delineation between product and infrastructure teams and Twitter's DevOps-style ownership…
E32 · 16 Jul 2025 · 49 min
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 covers: How Dapr creates a clean separation between application code and underlying infrastructure services like messaging, state management, and secrets Why platform teams struggle with tight coupling…
E31 · 2 Jul 2025 · 48 min
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 Enumerations (CREs) - an open-source approach that's doing for reliability what CVEs did for security. After spending a decade at the NSA hunting vulnerabilities, Tony recognized that the same…
E30 · 28 May 2025 · 57 min
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-ready code daily using AI assistance. But it's not just about speed - learn how this approach enables developers to tackle previously impossible projects and explore larger design spaces. From DevOps…
E29 · 30 Apr 2025 · 45 min
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. Drawing from his extensive experience at IBM, VMware, and Veeam, Allan discusses how security teams can shift left effectively without creating friction. Key topics covered: Building successful…
E28 · 16 Apr 2025 · 41 min
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 handle multi-tenancy in Kubernetes. By running virtual Kubernetes control planes inside namespaces, vCluster enables teams to experiment with different versions, operators, and configurations while…
E27 · 2 Apr 2025 · 54 min
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 shift from external platforms to internal ones often comes from specific business needs, like compliance requirements Successful platform engineering requires finding the right balance between…
E26 · 19 Mar 2025 · 48 min
Testing smart TV applications presents unique challenges that traditional web testing approaches can't solve. Dave Lucia, CTO and co-founder of TV Labs, shares how his team built a platform that virtualizes televisions and set-top boxes to help media companies test their smart TV apps on physical devices. Learn about TV Labs' innovative architecture and how they handle everything from camera-based testing systems to their custom Lua-based DSL for faster test execution. A key highlight is how choosing Elixir as their primary technology has enabled TV Labs to build a robust orchestration…
E25 · 26 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 3 min
Why do 70% of organizations still struggle to adopt infrastructure as code? Sören Martius, CPO and co-founder of Terramate, joins Cory O'Daniel to tackle the challenges of modern infrastructure management and the delicate balance between vendor trust and lock-in. The conversation explores practical solutions for common infrastructure challenges, from managing monolithic state files to orchestrating complex deployments. Martius shares insights on: When to maintain a monolithic state file versus breaking it into smaller units How infrastructure needs evolve as engineering teams grow beyond 100…
E24 · 5 Feb 2025 · 57 min
Building infrastructure tooling doesn't require massive VC funding or a huge team - just ask Malcolm Matalka , co-founder of bootstrapped Terrateam . Malcolm shares his journey from real estate websites to investment banking to biotech, before landing in infrastructure automation. Learn how Terrateam takes a unique "libraries over frameworks" approach to development, prioritizing simplicity and control by carefully selecting dependencies and building critical components in-house. Malcolm explains how this philosophy leads to more maintainable code and better security outcomes. As an early…
E23 · 22 Jan 2025 · 1 hr 16 min
Is GitOps holding your team back? In this thought-provoking conversation with Massdriver co-founder Dave Williams, we challenge conventional wisdom around cloud infrastructure management and explore why traditional approaches to compliance and self-service may be creating more problems than they solve. Discover how leading organizations are moving beyond ceremonial approval processes to create truly automated, self-service platforms that enhance developer productivity while maintaining security and control. Learn why treating infrastructure as code differently from application code could be…
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.
Platform Engineering Podcast is a English tech & science podcast from Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
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