Platform Engineering Podcast

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 podcast
William 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, Blog
William Collins, YouTube
William Collins, X
William Collins, Instagram
William Collins, TikTok
William Collins, GitHub
Itential
“The Cloud Gambit” podcast

Links to interesting things from this episode:
Ghostty
“Harness design for long-running application development” by Anthropic

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 Labs
Pavlo 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, X
https://pavlobaron.medium.com/
https://github.com/platform-engineering-labs
https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-labs
https://x.com/plateng_labs
https://bsky.app/profile/platform.engineering
https://mastodon.social/@plateng_labs
https://www.youtube.com/@plateng-labs
Links to interesting things from this episode:
The Pkl Primer
formae
formae quick start
"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"
“Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.” Albert Bandura
JPL “Visions of the Future”
“Fallout: New Vegas”

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
Why Extend avoids servers and VPC complexity, and what they use instead
Patterns for active-active, multi-region thinking in a serverless architecture
How DevEx practices like templates and ephemeral environments reduce friction
A pragmatic approach to IaC with CDK and reusable internal constructs
Where serverless costs stay low, and why observability often dominates the bill
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:
Episode with Adrian Cockroft
“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:
OpenClaw (aka Moltbot, aka Clawdbot)
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