Platform Engineering Podcast Podcast Por Cory O'Daniel CEO of Massdriver arte de portada

Platform Engineering Podcast

Platform Engineering Podcast

De: Cory O'Daniel CEO of Massdriver
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The Platform Engineering Podcast is a show about the real work of building and running internal platforms — hosted by Cory O’Daniel, longtime infrastructure and software engineer, and CEO/cofounder of Massdriver. Each episode features candid conversations with the engineers, leads, and builders shaping platform engineering today. Topics range from org structure and team ownership to infrastructure design, developer experience, and the tradeoffs behind every “it depends.” Cory brings two decades of experience building platforms — and now spends his time thinking about how teams scale infrastructure without creating bottlenecks or burning out ops. This podcast isn’t about trends. It’s about how platform engineering actually works inside real companies. Whether you're deep into Terraform/OpenTofu modules, building golden paths, or just trying to keep your platform from becoming a dumpster fire — you’ll probably find something useful here.Copyright 2025 | All Rights Reserved | Massdriver, Inc. Economía Exito Profesional Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins

    AI-Native Ops: Making AI Safe for Production with William Collins
    Apr 1 2026
    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 what AI-Native Ops looks like when you take reliability seriously: where reasoning should stop, where deterministic automation should begin, and how guardrails like compliance checks, version pinning, and controlled workflows keep AI from turning into outage fuel. Cory and William also dig into why context windows and tool sprawl matter in real systems, how protocols like MCP and agent-to-agent communication are shaping day-to-day automation, and why regulated environments can’t adopt new tech with hype-driven shortcuts.If you’re a platform engineer trying to balance speed with safety, this conversation offers a practical way to use AI for the work that drags teams down, without giving up operational discipline.Guest: William Collins, Director of Technical Evangelism at Itential, AWS community builder, and the co-host of the Cloud Gambit podcastWilliam Collins is a strategic thinker and catalyst for innovation. Over his career, he has helped enterprises build large-scale networks, driven modernization through cloud adoption, and excels at optimizing complex environments through good design practices and automation. Today, William works as Director of Technical Evangelism for Itential, where he focuses on evangelizing the Itential Platform, fostering strong relationships with customers to fully realize their goals, engaging with community, and advocating for the successful future of network, security, and automation infrastructure.As a content creator, William hosts The Cloud Gambit Podcast with Eyvonne Sharp, a show that unravels the state of cloud computing, markets, strategy, and emerging trends with industry experts. He is also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor (Automation, Cloud, and Network Engineering Content), AWS Community Builder (Network & Content Delivery), and is a group organizer for the USNUA - Kentucky User Group (KYNUG).Prior to Itential, William worked as a Principal Cloud Architect and Director of Technical Evangelism for Alkira where he helped grow the company from lean beginnings to being ranked 25th Fastest-Growing Company in North America and 6th in the Bay Area on the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500. He also held various senior technical roles across the enterprise space in Financial Services and Healthcare, most recently at Humana as Director of Cloud Architecture. Outside of tech, his time is spent with family, woodworking, ice hockey, and guitar.Opinions expressed are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer.William Collins, BlogWilliam Collins, YouTubeWilliam Collins, X William Collins, Instagram William Collins, TikTokWilliam Collins, GitHubItential“The Cloud Gambit” podcastLinks to interesting things from this episode:Ghostty“Harness design for long-running application development” by Anthropic
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron

    Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron
    Mar 18 2026
    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 does ops automation so often feel like it needs babysitting?Pavlo Baron breaks down where Infrastructure as Code tends to break down in real organizations: manual drift management, low-level state complexity, and a lack of practical abstractions that let developers self-serve without inheriting the entire ops burden.The conversation digs into what a more use-case-driven approach could look like - where teams can choose when to enforce desired state, when to accept emergency changes, and how to build “guardrails” that reduce mistakes without slowing delivery.Pavlo also explains why type safety and constrained interfaces matter (especially as AI starts generating more code and infrastructure changes), and why the future of platform engineering depends less on slogans and more on systems that reduce toil.Guest: Pavlo Baron, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering LabsPavlo Baron is Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, who are crafting tools to remove the toil from the operations work, with a current focus on infrastructure. He is a veteran in the space, having served in all kinds of roles throughout his career that spans more than 35 years. Previously, he was co-founder, CTO, and major inventor at an observability startup, Instana, that was acquired by IBM in 2020. Pavlo is a frequent conference speaker and author of several books.Pavlo Baron, Xhttps://pavlobaron.medium.com/https://github.com/platform-engineering-labshttps://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-labshttps://x.com/plateng_labshttps://bsky.app/profile/platform.engineeringhttps://mastodon.social/@plateng_labshttps://www.youtube.com/@plateng-labsLinks to interesting things from this episode:The Pkl Primerformaeformae quick start"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"“Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.” Albert BanduraJPL “Visions of the Future”“Fallout: New Vegas”
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    58 m
  • Why Extend Went All-In on Serverless Platform Engineering

    Why Extend Went All-In on Serverless Platform Engineering
    Mar 4 2026

    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.

    Justin Masse, Senior Platform DevOps Engineer at Extend, shares how Extend committed early to a serverless-first approach and built a platform that prioritizes developer speed and low operational toil. The conversation breaks down what it takes to run active-active, multi-region systems in a serverless world, how the team keeps services small and fast, and why asynchronous, event-driven design changes both reliability and cost.

    You’ll also hear how Extend treats developer experience as a core platform responsibility: templated microservices, fast deployment pipelines, ephemeral environments for pull requests, and infrastructure that developers can own without becoming cloud specialists. A big theme is using AWS CDK and internal abstractions to keep infrastructure close to the application code, so teams can move quickly while keeping platform standards consistent.

    Finally, the discussion gets practical about tradeoffs that show up after the “serverless is easy” pitch: local development challenges, the real cost center (observability), and where AI is helping today, including an internal agent that diagnoses failed deployments and suggests fixes.

    What you’ll learn

    1. Why Extend avoids servers and VPC complexity, and what they use instead
    2. Patterns for active-active, multi-region thinking in a serverless architecture
    3. How DevEx practices like templates and ephemeral environments reduce friction
    4. A pragmatic approach to IaC with CDK and reusable internal constructs
    5. Where serverless costs stay low, and why observability often dominates the bill
    6. How AI is being applied to platform workflows without skipping engineering judgment

    Guest: Jusin Masse, Senior Platform DevOps Engineer at Extend

    Justin Masse is a self-proclaimed lead chaos engineer, recognized within niche engineering communities for his expertise Chaos Engineering and Infrastructure & DevOps.

    The father of three young kids, a husband, a recent MBA graduate, recent cancer survivor, and competitive powerlifter, he still finds time to actively contribute to the platform engineering community.

    Justin Masse, website

    Justin Masse, GitHub

    Extend, website

    Links to interesting things from this episode:

    1. Episode with Adrian Cockroft
    2. “From $erverless to Elixir” by Cory O’Daniel
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    1 h y 2 m
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