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

What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challenge: operating systems without experts to consult.

Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic, has spent 15 years watching observability evolve from basic server monitoring to understanding complex distributed systems. Now he's tackling the next frontier: how to maintain and operate software when there's no human author to ask why something was built a certain way.

The conversation covers the shift from instrumentation being the hard problem to understanding being the bottleneck. Nic explains why inventory matters more than you think, how to approach AI-generated code as a black box that needs testing and telemetry, and why "garbage in, safety out" should be your new mantra.

You'll learn practical strategies for instrumenting modern systems with OpenTelemetry, why your observability hierarchy needs to start with knowing what's actually running, and how to build platforms that make safe deployment easier than risky shortcuts. Nic also shares his perspective on technical drift versus technical debt and what changes when your best troubleshooting tool - institutional knowledge - no longer exists.

Whether you're drowning in observability data or just starting to instrument your systems, this conversation offers concrete approaches for building understanding into your platform engineering practice.

Guest: Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic

Nic Benders is New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist. Part of the Engineering team since the early days of the company, Nic has been involved with everything from Agents to ZooKeeper and all the pieces and products in between. As New Relic's Chief Technical Strategist, he now looks after the long-term technical strategy behind the product and the experience of all the engineering teams who build it. Before New Relic, he worked in the mobile space, managing back-end messaging and commerce systems powering some of the largest carriers in the world.

New Relic, website

New Relic, Blog

Links to interesting things from this episode:

1. OpenClaw (aka Moltbot, aka Clawdbot)
2. Moltbook

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