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 realities
• How “living diagrams” help new teammates understand prod on day one
• Practical guardrails that evolve with your org without locking teams in
• Ways to reduce drift, surprise cloud costs, and Day Two chaos
• A 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