Platform Engineering Podcast

Taking a Summer Break: What Would You Like To Hear This Fall?

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

What Do Service Meshes Actually Solve? (William Morgan, Buoyant/Linkerd)

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 ca

Continuous Integration at Agentic Velocity with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber

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

Durable Execution for Real‑World Failures with Temporal’s Cornelia Davis

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 p

You Need AI Sysadmins Can Trust, With Cribl's Nikhil Mungel

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 lo

Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer

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

AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins

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 w

Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron

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 Extend Went All-In on Serverless Platform Engineering

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.

Observability in the AI Era with New Relic's Nic Benders

What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challeng

Simplicity at Scale: Cleaning House for Platform Teams with Brian Childress

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-enginee

Using Feature Flags to Tame Complexity with Mike Zorn

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 practic

Policy as Code: Kyverno and Securing Kubernetes at Scale with Jim Bugwadia

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

Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Beyond Pipelines: Infrastructure As Data

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

Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Are CI/CD and GitOps Just Making Things Harder?

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 Cor

Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower — Why IaC Alone Isn’t Enough

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

How to Ship Faster with Feature Flags: Insights from Unleash

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 pain

GraphQL, MCP, and the Future of APIs with Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis

**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

Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview with Mike Mroczka

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 an

From React to Dagster: Pete Hunt on Data, Infra, and AI-Ready Platforms

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 orchestrat