Platform Engineering Podcast

Feeling overwhelmed by the number of apps you need to manage while building developer trust, managing costs, and trying to create an extensible platform that teams actually want to use?

Joel Vasallo shares practical insights from scaling TAG's platform engineering initiatives across multiple healthcare organizations. Learn how his team transformed deployment times from weeks to minutes while maintaining security and compliance. Joel breaks down the journey from initial Kubernetes adoption to managing 70+ applications. 

Listeners will gain actionable strategies for:

• Starting small with platform initiatives and building organic buy-in
• Balancing standardization with team autonomy
• Managing cloud costs across multiple organizations
• Building trust through visibility and auditability

Whether you're in healthcare or any regulated industry, this conversation provides a practical roadmap for evolving your platform engineering practice.

Guest: Joel Vasallo, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at TAG

Joel is the Senior Director of Platform Engineering at TAG - The Aspen Group where he leads teams focused on DevOps, SRE, and Delivery Engineering. Together, these teams aim to build and architect highly available cloud environments, develop infrastructure and development tools, and empower developers through fully automated deployment pipelines. In his spare time, he runs monthly meetups in Chicago through the Google Developers program. When he isn’t working, he loves exploring Sweet Home Chicago!

Joel Vasallo - X

Joel Vasallo - Medium

The Aspen Group (TAG)

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Argo
• Istio
• Solo
• Prometheus
• Karpenter
• “From $erverless to Elixir”
• Duckbill
• Corey Quinn
• Malört

Navigating cloud migrations and building modern platforms is challenging in the best of circumstances. Alex Voorhees, VP of Cloud Engineering at 66 Degrees, shares valuable lessons from helping organizations as they take on these challenges.

Don’t miss his insights on:

• How to tackle the human and organizational challenges that come with cloud transformation
• Practical strategies for upskilling teams transitioning from traditional ops to cloud operations
• Key considerations when implementing platform engineering solutions across different organizational maturity levels
• Integrating AI capabilities into cloud architecture
• Common pitfalls to avoid when moving legacy applications to the cloud
• Approaches for balancing innovation with practical business needs during cloud migration

Whether you're leading a cloud migration, building a platform team, or interested in the future of cloud operations, this episode offers concrete takeaways for navigating the technical and organizational challenges of modern infrastructure.

Guest: Alex Voorhees, VP of Cloud Engineering at 66 Degrees

Alex Voorhees is the Vice President of Cloud Engineering at 66degrees. Prior to joining 66degrees, he was the Vice President of Customer Engineering at Cloudbakers.

Alex Voorhees - X

66 Degrees - Website

66 Degrees - X

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Backstage
• Spacelift
• Jenkins
• Anthropic
• Interview with Amey Patil from Google
• Lattice

John Dietz, CEO and co-founder of Konstruct (formerly Kubefirst), joins us fresh from KubeCon North America to discuss the evolution of cloud-native platform adoption. John shares insights into Konstruct's mission to make Kubernetes and cloud-native technology more accessible, reducing the typical 18-month adoption timeline to minutes.

The conversation explores Konstruct's two main products: Kubefirst, an open-source GitOps platform, and Colony, their new solution for bare metal and data center deployments. John discusses the company's philosophy on open-source licensing, the importance of building trust in platform engineering, and their unique approach to commercialization while maintaining core platform accessibility.

Don’t miss our new segment: TrashOps!

Guest: John Dietz, CEO and Co-founder of Konstruct

John Dietz is the friendly CEO and relentless technical cofounder driving Konstruct (formerly Kubefirst). John and his cofounder, Jared Edwards, embarked on the Kubefirst venture with humble beginnings, building the product off-hours while navigating a year-long stealth enterprise pilot before open sourcing the project onto the CNCF landscape. Kubefirst was acquired by Kubeshop in 2022, and then again by the Civo Cloud in 2024.

John’s entrepreneurial spirit sparked at a young age. At 22 he bootstrapped his own software and services company, a role he dedicated 19 years to before founding Kubefirst. During that time he doubled as engineering leads in the DevOps space in numerous successful startup and enterprise environments, gaining expertise in high scale software delivery, site reliability, platform architecture, and cloud engineering. His pivotal role in transitioning USA Today to the public cloud atop a hybrid cloud abstraction layer showcased his ability as a software platform architect of the early enterprise public cloud adopter.

John has been at the forefront of Kubernetes adoption since 2017 and has assisted hundreds of companies in their transition to cloud native architectures with the Kubefirst open source platform.

John Dietz - X

Konstruct - Website

Konstruct - GitHub

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Civo Cloud
• groundcover
• Infisical
• Flatcar
• OpenTofu
• Tinkerbell

Jessica Kalinowski, VP of DevOps and Corporate IT at Connect RN, shares her journey from corporate IT to implementing DevOps and platform engineering in a startup environment. Jessica discusses the challenges and successes of applying tech strategies in healthcare.

The episode covers strategies for platform adoption, including early engineer engagement and flexible implementation. Jessica discusses how automation has enabled efficient management with a small team, benefiting the entire organization.

Guest:  Jessica Kalinowski, Vice President of DevOps and Corporate IT at connectRN

Vice President of DevOps and Corp IT with 15+ years’ experience in IT as well as a proven ability to promote and champion best-in-class cloud migrations. Expertise in leading and managing transformational/ cultural change comprehensively throughout multinational organizations. Strength areas include strategic thinking and IT/ cloud thought leadership, adaptability and resiliency, complex problem-solving, and optimal solution identification through collaboration and partnership. De-centralized leadership style with emphasis on building strong, self-sufficient teams.

connectRN

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Office Space
• Foundations of the Cloud With Mark Burgess, CFEngine
• Foundations of The Cloud With Adam Jacob, Chef
• Foundations of The Cloud With Mitchell Hashimoto, Terraform
• Foundations of The Cloud With Brian Grant, Kubernetes

In this episode, Solomon Hykes discusses the journey from Docker's inception to its widespread adoption, the challenges faced in open-source development, and his current work with Dagger. He explains how Dagger aims to revolutionize continuous integration by making pipelines more modular and efficient, addressing the "push and pray" problem in software development. Hykes also shares insights on the evolution of DevOps, the complexities of open-source business models, and his vision for the future of software development workflows.

Guest: Solomon Hykes, Co-founder of Docker and Dagger

Solomon Hykes is the co-founder and CEO of Dagger.io, the first programmable CI/CD engine. Before that, he was the co-founder of Docker, where he served for 10 years as CEO then CTO, and a founding member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Solomon grew up in France, and now lives in San Francisco.

Solomon Hykes - Twitter

Docker

Dagger.io

Dagger - Discord

Dagger - YouTube

“The Future of Linux Containers”

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Firecracker
• Cloudflare
• Fastly
• WebAssembly
• Heroku
• Vercel
• Netlify
• Ansible
• Bazel
• Nix
• Jenkins
• Haskell
• Pre-commit
• Kubesimplify
• Dagger Workshop with Solomon Hykes: Hands-On Tutorial & Community Collaboration

In this episode of the Platform Engineering Podcast, Cory O'Daniel sits down with Justin Berman, Vice President of Platform Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer at Thirty Madison. Justin shares his journey from software engineering to security leadership, discusses the challenges of building secure and scalable platforms, and offers insights into the future of platform engineering and security integration.

Guest: Justin Berman, VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer at Thirty Madison

Justin Berman is the VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer at Thirty Madison. Prior he was Head of Security at Dropbox, responsible for Dropbox’s information/cyber security, content safety, and platform abuse prevention capabilities, which provide unmatched protections to their users, staff and products. In this role, Justin and his team ensured that Dropbox enables storing, sharing and collaborating on various kinds of content in a trustworthy and secure manner, for all their customers worldwide, from large enterprise Dropbox business accounts to individual consumers. Prior to Dropbox, Justin was the CISO at Zenefits, where he was responsible for scaling the security and IT capabilities and developing the privacy and risk/compliance capabilities.

Thirty Madison

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Datadog
• Splunk
• Foundations of The Cloud With Mitchell Hashimoto, Terraform
• Foundations of The Cloud With Brian Grant, Kubernetes
• Foundations of The Cloud With Adam Jacob, Chef
• From Netflix to the Cloud: Adrian Cockroft on DevOps, Microservices, and Sustainability

Join us as we learn about Stack Overflow's monumental shift from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud with Peter O'Connor, Director of Platform Engineering. Peter shares invaluable insights on navigating the complexities of migrating a beloved developer platform, balancing technical challenges with team dynamics, and fostering a culture of innovation. From the intricacies of lift-and-shift strategies to the nuances of adopting microservices, this episode offers a masterclass in modern platform engineering. Discover how Stack Overflow is revolutionizing its architecture while maintaining its core mission of serving developers worldwide.

Guest: Peter O'Connor, Director of Platform Engineering at Stack Overflow

Peter leads teams of engineers dedicated to innovating how they elevate their product engineering teams, enabling them to deploy services to the cloud with greater ease and confidence. Their focus spans the cloud platform, UI platform, and search platform.

With a rich background in innovating new workflows, leveraging cutting-edge tools, and leading teams to achieve better outcomes, Peter has found creating platforms as products for their engineering teams to be a rewarding challenge in his career.

Before transitioning into tech, he freelanced and taught Chemistry and Computer Science at both secondary and collegiate levels. This experience deepened his understanding of guiding teams, building the right products, and fostering continual improvement among team members.

Peter O’Connor - Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Hacker News
• "Microservices — architecture nihilism in minimalism's clothes"
• Svelte
• Islands
• OpenCost
• Score
• Elasticsearch
• "Navigating AI And Platform Engineering With Amey Patil"

Want your work to mean more?

In this inspiring episode of the Platform Engineering Podcast, we welcome Grace Huntley, Director of Engineering for DevOps, InfoSec, and Safety Net Innovation Lab at Code for America. Grace shares her unconventional journey from licensed plumber to civic tech leader, driven by personal experiences and a passion for solving societal challenges through technology. 

Discover how Code for America is revolutionizing government services, making them more accessible and efficient for those in need. Grace discusses the transition from private sector to civic tech, the challenges of working with government systems, and the exciting potential of AI in improving public services. 

This episode offers valuable insights into the intersection of technology, social impact, and the future of civic engagement.

Guest:  Grace Huntley, Director of Software Engineering at Code for America

Grace Huntley brings over 15 years of leadership experience, showcasing a versatile skill set that spans various levels of management and encompasses projects across the full technology stack and diverse industries. Her journey into the world of technology began professionally at the age of 13 when she devoted after-school hours to assembling XT’s and 286’s in a local computer store, sparking a lifelong passion for computing.

Grace’s hands-on experience extends beyond the professional realm. Over the last 15 years, she has navigated the intricate challenges associated with accessing safety-net programs while caring for her daughter, who faces significant medical challenges. This personal experience has deepened her understanding of the importance of technology in addressing real-world issues and shaped her commitment to making a positive impact through her work.

Outside the realm of software leadership, Grace is an active contributor to non-profit initiatives. Currently serving on the board of Openhouse SF, an organization dedicated to providing affordable housing and services for the aging LGBT community, she continues to advocate for inclusivity and community support.

Beyond her professional and philanthropic endeavors, Grace finds joy in her role as an avid gardener and sustainability enthusiast. Her commitment to both personal and professional growth, combined with a genuine passion for making a difference, defines Grace Huntley’s impactful journey in the realms of technology, community service, and environmental consciousness.

Code for America - Website

Code for America - X

Code for America - Instagram

Code for America - LinkedIn

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Safety Net Information
• Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Get CalFresh
• Clear My Record
• Direct File
• NIST
• The Audacious Project
• Blue Meridian Partners

Technical expertise is undoubtedly important when it comes to implementing Platform Engineering but unless you are also paying close attention to the human factor and the cultural aspects of building an effective team it will be much harder to succeed.

Cory talks to Morteza Irdmousa, Head of Platform Engineering at Curative, about his experiences in Platform Engineering and DevOps. Join them as they explore the need for a holistic approach that considers both technical and cultural aspects of implementing Platform teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable takeaways as they discuss key issues such as team integration, psychological safety, team engagement, and messaging that truly conveys the business impact of platform engineering work.

Guest: Morteza Irdmousa, Head of Platform Engineering at Curative

Currently head of platform engineering at Curative in health and having served as Director of Engineering in Raytheon focused around platform in the defense space, Morteza Irdmousa considers himself fortunate to learn a lot along the way and to still be learning. MLOps, Data platforms and traditional platform team duties are his current focus areas.

Curative

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Kessel Run
• Platfrom One
• DX
• Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

In this episode Cory sits down with Adrian Cockroft, a pioneering technologist who played a crucial role in Netflix's transition to cloud computing and microservices architecture. Adrian shares insights from his impressive career, including his work at Netflix, AWS, and beyond. He discusses the evolution of DevOps practices, the rise of microservices, and the challenges of platform engineering in today's complex cloud environments. Adrian also delves into the pressing issue of sustainability in tech, offering valuable perspectives on the environmental impact of AI and machine learning workloads. Whether you're a seasoned DevOps professional or just starting your journey in cloud computing, this episode offers a wealth of knowledge from one of the industry's most influential figures.

Guest: Adrian Cockcroft, Tech Advisor

Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations.

He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today. Adrian spent the last few years as a VP at Amazon deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself – one of the largest companies in the world – become more sustainable, and via AWS – one of the largest technology suppliers in the world – helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable.

Adrian Cockcroft - Mastodon

Adrian Cockcroft - Medium

Adrian Cockcroft - GitHub

Adrian Cockcroft - Soundcloud

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Cloud for CEOs: Measure innovation with one metric
• Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet
• ACM Queue, “A Conversation with Werner Vogels”
• The Value Flywheel Effect: Power the Future and Accelerate Your Organization to the Modern Cloud
• That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea
• Medium, “So many bad takes — What is there to learn from the Prime Video microservices to monolith story”
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
• “How do Committees Invent?” by Melvin Conway
• Lambda Labs
• Medium, “Platform Engineering Teams Done Right…”
• AWS Well-Architected Framework - Sustainability
• Green Software Foundation
• Green Software Foundation, Real-Time Cloud
• Environmental Variables podcast