Platform Engineering Podcast

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. Durable execution is a way to design systems that keep going anyway - without rebuilding a maze of queues, cron jobs, and manual cleanup.Cornelia Davis breaks down how durable execution works in practice: writing “normal” code while the runtime provides durable retries, state management, and the ability to pause work, wait for a human or external change (like a quota increase), and resume right where things left off. The conversation connects these ideas to platform engineering realities - Terraform workflows, long provisioning times, and “orphan” resources - and explains how Temporal workflows and activities help teams model failure handling as a first-class part of the system.You’ll also hear why this approach is showing up in AI engineering: long-running agent workflows, frequent rate limiting, and the need to avoid re-running expensive LLM calls when something breaks near the end.Guest: Cornelia Davis, Developer Advocate at Temporal Technologies and author of “Cloud Native Patterns”Cornelia Davis is a Developer Advocate at Temporal, where she brings more than three decades of experience as a software technologist to help engineers build resilient, scalable systems. Known for her pragmatic blend of hands-on coding, technical strategy, and customer collaboration, Cornelia is passionate about helping developers unlock the full potential of modern cloud-native architectures. Previously, she served as VP of Technology at Pivotal, where she played a key role in shaping Cloud Foundry and enabling enterprise cloud transformations. Whether she’s writing code, presenting at conferences, or whiteboarding with teams, Cornelia is driven by a singular goal: empowering developers to build better software. Outside of tech, she recharges on the yoga mat or in the kitchen, where she brings the same creativity and focus to her practice.Temporal, WebsiteTemporal, GitHubTemporal Community, GitHubTemporal’s AI-assisted development toolsLinks to interesting things from this episode:Temporal Developer Skill“Cloud Native Patterns” by Cornelia Davis

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. The conversation digs into harness engineering and the practical guardrails that turn probabilistic models into repeatable, verifiable outcomes. They cover why breaking work into small chunks matters, how validation and testing become the real leverage point for AI-native development, and what “code factories” mean for review, CI, and platform reliability when teams can generate a thousand PRs an hour.Platform engineers will also hear a pragmatic take on the future of the job. The focus shifts away from typing code and toward building systems for verification, simulation, and safe deployment at scale, plus clearer ways to decide what needs human scrutiny and what can ship automatically.Guest: Nikhil Mungel, Head of AI R&D at CriblNikhil Mungel is the Head of AI R&D at Cribl, where he's building LLM-powered systems for IT and Security data transformation and analysis. Before Cribl, he spent over a decade developing distributed systems across the observability and consumer social tech landscape. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two kids. His current focus is applying AI to make complex infrastructure more intuitive and explainable.Nikhil Mungel, WebsiteNikhil Mungel, XCribl, WebsiteCribl, LinkedInLinks to interesting things from this episode:Cribl Guard“Open source died in March. It just doesn't know it yet.” by Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard

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. They break down what a merge queue is, why logical merge conflicts happen even when individual PRs are green, and how predictive testing helps protect main without forcing constant retesting.Eli also explains how Trunk approaches flaky tests: collecting JUnit results, using quarantines so known flakes don’t block delivery, and fingerprinting failures to tell the difference between “this always times out” and “this was just broken by a recent change.” The conversation closes on how review and quality practices may shift as code generation accelerates - and what still needs strong guardrails like tests, security checks, and reliable CI signals.Guest: Eli Schleifer, co-founder and CEO of TrunkEli Schleifer leads Trunk’s technical vision and product strategy, focused on closing the gap between AI-speed code generation and human-speed delivery by removing the bottlenecks that slow modern engineering teams. Trunk’s platform eliminates flaky tests, resolves merge queue constraints, and redesigns CI systems to enable high-throughput, continuous delivery.Prior to founding Trunk, Eli was CTO at Directr, which was acquired by Google, and has served in engineering leadership roles at YouTube, Uber, and Microsoft.Eli Schleifer, XTrunk, websiteTrunk, SlackTrunk, GithubTrunk, XLinks to interesting things from this episode:Balsamiq“Code First Engineering” by Eli Schleifer

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

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”