Platform Engineering Podcast

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 humans and AI tools so both can contribute faster
• Where teams introduce unnecessary complexity with Kubernetes, microservices, and NoSQL
• How to think about scaling in three dimensions: users, developers, and features
• Why good architecture, docs, and decision records make AI more useful, not less
• How 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:

• Replit
• Lovable

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 log levels and rate limits for specific customers on the fly
• Managing flag sprawl so teams do not drown in half-rolled-out features
• Experimenting 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:

• SigNoz
• Signadot
• Open Container Initiative
• “Using Feature Flags to Avoid Downtime During Migrations”
• Apache Iceberg

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 teams
• How to implement Kubernetes policy enforcement without grinding deployments to a halt
• Automating secure defaults: network policies, resource quotas, and role bindings
• The crawl-walk-run approach to rolling out policies in existing clusters
• Real-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” Paper
• OpenReports
• Policy Reporter
• “The Shai-Hulud npm malware attack: A wake-up call for supply chain security”
• Kyverno Slack Channel

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 instead
• How to reason about drift as a three‑way merge with reality
• When reconciliation helps, and when it breaks production firefights
• How typed contracts and artifacts connect modules and teams without glue scripts
• Ways to present safer self‑service without requiring everyone to learn Terraform
• A 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

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

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 toil
• When click-ops is a symptom, not the problem - and how to replace it safely
• Patterns for scaling platform practices beyond a handful of experts
• A simple mental model for mapping workflows across serverless, containers, and VMs

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:

• "The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim
• "15 Years of Duct Tape - Why IaC Adoption Stalled at 30"

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 code and how flags provide the control layer to move faster while protecting reliability.

What you’ll learn:

• How feature flags reduce risk for high-stakes periods like Black Friday by avoiding code freezes
• When to replace staging queues with progressive delivery and experiment-driven rollouts
• Practical uses: kill switches, trunk-based development, targeting, and cleanup strategies to manage flag debt
• Build vs. buy: why DIY flag systems become costly and how Unleash’s open source and on-prem options fit regulated or air‑gapped needs
• Using business, engineering, and customer signals to automate safe ramp-ups and ramp-backs
• Why AI increases code throughput, how it affects reliability, and how flags create the safety rails for agentic workflows

Guest: Michael Ferranti, VP of Marketing at Unleash

Michael Ferranti has held leadership roles at Teleport, Portworx, ClusterHQ, and Rackspace Technology, with a focus on go-to-market strategy in open-source and enterprise software. At Teleport he focused on shifting from legacy security models to developer-first, identity-driven access. At Portworx, he was building new GTM strategies for Kubernetes-native storage when everyone was still figuring out containers, and he helped scale the company from under $500K in revenue to a $370M acquisition by Pure Storage. His work has centered on supporting engineering leaders in delivering features, scaling infrastructure, and improving security without adding unnecessary blockers. Michael has spoken at industry events like KubeCon and theCUBE, sharing insights on platform org design, category creation, and growing open-source adoption.

Unleash, website

Unleash, GitHub

Unleash, LinkedIn

Unleash, X

Unleash, Slack

Unleash, YouTube

UnleashCon 2025

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• React
• Bitbucket
• LaunchDarkly
• ServiceNow
• CockroachDB
• Red Hat OpenShift
• State of DevOps Report (DORA)
• "How to Win Friends & Influence People"
• Grafana

** REMINDER** - 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

**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 of speeding up frontends, tightening observability, and running focused personalization without “fat” APIs.

What you’ll learn:

• A plain-language model for GraphQL and why it decouples frontend needs from backend services
• How typing, schema docs, and field-level telemetry reduce risk and enable LLM-driven tooling
• Practical ways to expose queries as MCP tools and start with internal “agentic DevOps”
• Tactics for experiments and personalization that stay fast and measurable at scale
• Why an end-to-end approach (client and server) matters for reliability and speed

Guest: Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL

Matt DeBergalis is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, focused on bringing the popular GraphQL technology to the enterprise. He previously served as Apollo's CTO, leading product and engineering. Matt's longtime focus has been in open source and platforms: he co-founded Meteor.js, which grew to become one of the most popular open-source projects in the world for developing full-stack web apps with JavaScript, as well as ActBlue, the American political fundraising platform that revolutionized grassroots political giving. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. In his spare time, Matt enjoys taking to the air and flying his 1966 Beechcraft Baron.

Apollo GraphQL, website

Apollo GraphQL, GitHub

Apollo GraphQL, LinkedIn

Apollo GraphQL, X

Apollo GraphQL, YouTube

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Free Software Foundation
• Cursor
• Motley Fool podcast
• GraphQL Summit

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
• Tactics to spot and reduce cheating without turning interviews into surveillance
• How to structure interviews for different seniority levels so you measure the right skills
• Salary negotiation playbook: timing, leverage, and common pitfalls that cost candidates real money
• Getting past the application black hole: skipping recruiters, networking that works, and coordinating offers

Who this helps:

• Engineers tired of grinding puzzles who want a smarter prep plan
• Hiring managers looking to improve signal and reduce false negatives
• Anyone preparing to negotiate an offer with confidence

Guest: Mike Mroczka, Primary author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, Ex-Google

Mike Mroczka, a former senior SWE (Google, Salesforce, GE), is now a tech consultant with a decade of experience helping engineers land their dream jobs. He’s a top-rated mentor (interviewing.io, Karat, Pathrise, Skilledinc) and the author of viral technical content on system design and technical interview strategies featured on HackerNews, Business Insider, and Wired.

Mike Mroczka, website

Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell 
• HackerOne 
• Interviewing.io 
• Cluely 
• Google glass 
• Ray-Ban 
• HackerRank⁠ 
• CodeSignal⁠

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 model, Pete offers valuable comparisons of these contrasting philosophies.

The conversation explores:

• How Dagster provides a higher-level abstraction for data teams, making it easier to track and debug data assets rather than just managing workflows
• The challenges of modern data platforms and why many organizations struggle with complex, distributed systems that could be simplified
• A practical approach to migrating from Airflow to Dagster with their "Airlift" toolkit that allows for incremental, low-risk transitions
• How AI development is fueling demand for better data orchestration as companies build applications that rely on properly managed data pipelines

Pete also shares his thoughtful approach to balancing technical debt and product development with a "quarter on, quarter off" cadence that allows teams to both ship features and clean up the inevitable corners that get cut under deadline pressure.

For platform engineers, data teams, and technical leaders navigating the intersection of infrastructure and AI, this episode provides practical insights on creating abstractions that deliver real operational value without unnecessary complexity.

Guest: Pete Hunt, CEO of Dagster

Pete is the CEO of Dagster Labs, where he first joined as Head of Engineering in early 2022 and transitioned into the CEO role later that same year. Before Dagster, Pete co-founded Smyte, an anti-abuse startup acquired by Twitter, where he continued as a senior staff engineer.

Earlier in his career, Pete was one of the first engineers to work on Instagram after its acquisition by Facebook in 2012. There, he led development on Instagram’s web and analytics teams and became a co-founder of the React.js project, helping transform an internal experiment into one of the most widely used front-end frameworks in the world. He was also part of the early community around GraphQL and has remained deeply engaged in open source and developer tooling.

Pete brings a pragmatic, hands-on perspective to modern data infrastructure. Having been both a founder and an engineer, he focuses on reducing complexity and fatigue in data teams by building tools that actually work together. At Dagster, he remains close to the code and actively involved in technical decisions, combining leadership with deep technical fluency.

Pete Hunt, X

Dagster

Dagster Pipes

Dagster Airlift

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• React
• “Postgres: a Better Message Queue than Kafka?”
• Airflow
• Kubeflow
• CAPES
• Fargate