Platform Engineering Podcast
by Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver
Latest episode
Taking a Summer Break: What Would You Like To Hear This Fall?
Taking a Summer Break: What Would You Like To Hear This Fall?
About this podcast
The Platform Engineering Podcast is about how we build, ship, and operate software, and why so much of it is still harder than it needs to be.
Hosted by Cory O'Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, the show brings together the people who built the tools we rely on and the engineers figuring out what comes next.
From the creators of Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes to the teams rethinking CI/CD, infrastructure automation, security, and developer experience, we dig into how these systems work, why they were designed that way, where they fall short, and what we'd do differently today.
We talk architecture, engineering decisions, organizational problems, and the tradeoffs that don't fit neatly into conference talks or vendor demos. Sometimes that means questioning practices the industry has treated as gospel for twenty years.
It's for engineers building internal developer platforms, running production infrastructure, or curious how software engineering got here and where it's going.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 52 episodes
- Taking a Summer Break: What Would You Like To Hear This Fall? · 3 min · Episode 52We'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…
- What Do Service Meshes Actually Solve? (William Morgan, Buoyant/Linkerd) · 56 min · Episode 51Network 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…
- Continuous Integration at Agentic Velocity with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber · 50 min · Episode 50When 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…
- Durable Execution for Real‑World Failures with Temporal’s Cornelia Davis · 46 min · Episode 49A 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…
- You Need AI Sysadmins Can Trust, With Cribl's Nikhil Mungel · 55 min · Episode 48What 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…
- Green CI and Merge Queue Mastery with Trunk’s Eli Schleifer · 50 min · Episode 47When 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…
- AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins · 1 h 3 min · Episode 46What 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…
- Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron · 58 min · Episode 45Terraform 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…
- Why Extend Went All-In on Serverless Platform Engineering · 1 h 2 min · Episode 44Billions 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…
- Observability in the AI Era with New Relic's Nic Benders · 51 min · Episode 43What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challenge…
- Simplicity at Scale: Cleaning House for Platform Teams with Brian Childress · 41 min · Episode 42Why 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…
- Using Feature Flags to Tame Complexity with Mike Zorn · 43 min · Episode 41What 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…
- Policy as Code: Kyverno and Securing Kubernetes at Scale with Jim Bugwadia · 42 min · Episode 40Most 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…
- Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Beyond Pipelines: Infrastructure As Data · 49 min · Episode 39Is 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…
- Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Are CI/CD and GitOps Just Making Things Harder? · 30 min · Episode 38What 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…
- Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower — Why IaC Alone Isn’t Enough · 40 min · Episode 37Ever 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…
- How to Ship Faster with Feature Flags: Insights from Unleash · 44 min · Episode 36Still 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…
- GraphQL, MCP, and the Future of APIs with Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis · 43 min · Episode 35**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…
- Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview with Mike Mroczka · 1 h 8 min · Episode 34Ever 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…
- From React to Dagster: Pete Hunt on Data, Infra, and AI-Ready Platforms · 50 min · Episode 33Is 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…
