Platform Engineering Podcast
Cory O'Daniel, CEO of Massdriver
Recent Episodes
What 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 why CI/CD pipelines and GitOps often break down for cloud infrastructure. They explore a simpler operational model: treat infrastructure as data, lean on clear checkpoints instead of rigid “golden paths,” and make production legible for both developers and ops.
You’ll learn:
- Where CI/CD adds friction for infra and what to do instead
- Why GitOps works for apps but hits limits for databases, networks, and multi-region realities
- How “living diagrams” help new teammates understand prod on day one
- Practical guardrails that evolve with your org without locking teams in
- Ways to reduce drift, surprise cloud costs, and Day Two chaos
- A mindset shift: databases for ops data, not shell-script archaeology
Walk away with concrete patterns to make production understandable, auditable, and easier to change—without more YAML or bigger pipelines.
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.
Links to interesting things from this episode:
- SigNoz
- “The $6,459 Terraform Lesson: Why Infrastructure Lifecycle Monitoring Matters” by Liz Fong-Jones
- "Gitopscracy" video
Ever 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 Kubernetes, configuration management has changed a lot - but the core struggle remains: too many decisions, not enough guardrails. Guest host Kelsey Hightower sits down with Cory O’Daniel to unpack where Infrastructure as Code succeeds and where teams get stuck.
What you’ll learn:
- How to avoid “choice overload” in cloud configs by moving decisions upstream
- Practical ways to pair IaC with UX, policies, and SLAs to reduce toil
- When click-ops is a symptom, not the problem - and how to replace it safely
- Patterns for scaling platform practices beyond a handful of experts
- A simple mental model for mapping workflows across serverless, containers, and VMs
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.
Links to interesting things from this episode:
- "The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim
- "15 Years of Duct Tape - Why IaC Adoption Stalled at 30"
Still 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 rollbacks.
Cory O’Daniel talks with Unleash VP of Marketing Michael Ferranti about how modern teams use flags as a core delivery primitive alongside CI/CD and trunk-based development. They dig into kill switches for instant mitigation, progressive rollouts tied to real metrics, and why homegrown “if-statement” systems turn into hidden platforms you didn’t mean to build. They also cover the rising volume of AI‑assisted code and how flags provide the control layer to move faster while protecting reliability.
What you’ll learn:
- How feature flags reduce risk for high-stakes periods like Black Friday by avoiding code freezes
- When to replace staging queues with progressive delivery and experiment-driven rollouts
- Practical uses: kill switches, trunk-based development, targeting, and cleanup strategies to manage flag debt
- Build vs. buy: why DIY flag systems become costly and how Unleash’s open source and on-prem options fit regulated or air‑gapped needs
- Using business, engineering, and customer signals to automate safe ramp-ups and ramp-backs
- Why AI increases code throughput, how it affects reliability, and how flags create the safety rails for agentic workflows
Guest: Michael Ferranti, VP of Marketing at Unleash
Michael Ferranti has held leadership roles at Teleport, Portworx, ClusterHQ, and Rackspace Technology, with a focus on go-to-market strategy in open-source and enterprise software. At Teleport he focused on shifting from legacy security models to developer-first, identity-driven access. At Portworx, he was building new GTM strategies for Kubernetes-native storage when everyone was still figuring out containers, and he helped scale the company from under $500K in revenue to a $370M acquisition by Pure Storage. His work has centered on supporting engineering leaders in delivering features, scaling infrastructure, and improving security without adding unnecessary blockers. Michael has spoken at industry events like KubeCon and theCUBE, sharing insights on platform org design, category creation, and growing open-source adoption.
Links to interesting things from this episode:
- React
- Bitbucket
- LaunchDarkly
- ServiceNow
- CockroachDB
- Red Hat OpenShift
- State of DevOps Report (DORA)
- "How to Win Friends & Influence People"
- Grafana
** REMINDER** - 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 code is: PodcastSummit25
**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 code is: PodcastSummit25
What if your API layer could help you ship faster today and make tomorrow’s AI workflows safer and easier to build?
Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis explains how GraphQL became a practical standard for unifying messy backends, why declarative schemas and strong types are the “bedrock” for agentic systems, and where MCP fits when you want agents to call business data safely. You’ll hear real examples of speeding up frontends, tightening observability, and running focused personalization without “fat” APIs.
What you’ll learn:
- A plain-language model for GraphQL and why it decouples frontend needs from backend services
- How typing, schema docs, and field-level telemetry reduce risk and enable LLM-driven tooling
- Practical ways to expose queries as MCP tools and start with internal “agentic DevOps”
- Tactics for experiments and personalization that stay fast and measurable at scale
- Why an end-to-end approach (client and server) matters for reliability and speed
Guest: Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL
Matt DeBergalis is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, focused on bringing the popular GraphQL technology to the enterprise. He previously served as Apollo's CTO, leading product and engineering. Matt's longtime focus has been in open source and platforms: he co-founded Meteor.js, which grew to become one of the most popular open-source projects in the world for developing full-stack web apps with JavaScript, as well as ActBlue, the American political fundraising platform that revolutionized grassroots political giving. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. In his spare time, Matt enjoys taking to the air and flying his 1966 Beechcraft Baron.
Links to interesting things from this episode:
Ever 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 ex-Googler, shares what really goes on behind technical hiring and how to navigate it to your advantage.
What you’ll learn:
- How leaked question banks and standardized puzzles can distort hiring signals - and where they still help
- Practical ways companies can make interviews fairer and harder to game, both on-site and remote
- A balanced take on data structures and algorithms: when they’re useful and when they’re noise
- Tactics to spot and reduce cheating without turning interviews into surveillance
- How to structure interviews for different seniority levels so you measure the right skills
- Salary negotiation playbook: timing, leverage, and common pitfalls that cost candidates real money
- Getting past the application black hole: skipping recruiters, networking that works, and coordinating offers
Who this helps:
- Engineers tired of grinding puzzles who want a smarter prep plan
- Hiring managers looking to improve signal and reduce false negatives
- Anyone preparing to negotiate an offer with confidence
Guest: Mike Mroczka, Primary author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, Ex-Google
Mike Mroczka, a former senior SWE (Google, Salesforce, GE), is now a tech consultant with a decade of experience helping engineers land their dream jobs. He’s a top-rated mentor (interviewing.io, Karat, Pathrise, Skilledinc) and the author of viral technical content on system design and technical interview strategies featured on HackerNews, Business Insider, and Wired.
Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview
Links to interesting things from this episode:
- Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- HackerOne
- Interviewing.io
- Cluely
- Google glass
- Ray-Ban
- HackerRank
- CodeSignal