Podcast profile
By 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.
Latest episode
3 min
Topics
Internal developer platforms, paved roads, self-service infrastructure, and platform teams.
Software delivery, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, collaboration, and operational practice.
Kubernetes architecture, operations, ecosystems, workloads, and cluster management.
Formats
Detailed technical, architectural, or research-oriented examination.
Host-led conversation where a guest supplies most of the subject matter.
Audience level
Regularly assumes specialist knowledge and discusses implementation, architecture, protocols, code, or research in depth.
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Episodes shown — 10 of 25
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 in the meantime. If you’ve got suggestions for guests or topics, please reach out — I’m always eager to annoy people into joining the conversation!
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 cascade, and “what talks to what?” becomes hard to answer.
When code gets cheaper to produce, feedback becomes the limiting factor - CI, reviews, and the handoffs between tools can quietly slow everything down.
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 process restarts.
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 lost data, downtime, or a security incident. Cribl’s Nikhil Mungel joins Cory to break down what it takes to build AI that sysadmins can actually trust.
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 show up as teams ship more code - especially with AI-assisted development increasing PR volume.
What happens when your “coworker” can generate code and changes faster than your team can review them, and production still has to stay up?
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?
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.
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.