Platform Engineering Playbook Podcast
The Platform Engineering Playbook Podcast is where AI meets open-source infrastructure knowledge—and you're part of the editorial process. Every episode is researched, scripted, and produced with AI, then reviewed by the community and published on GitHub for anyone to improve. Facing tool sprawl across 130+ platforms? Justifying PaaS costs to your CFO? Navigating the Shadow AI crisis hitting 85% of organizations? We tackle the messy realities of platform engineering that most content avoids, delivering data-backed insights and decision frameworks you can use Monday morning. Built for senior engineers, SREs, and DevOps practitioners with 5+ years in production, we dissect cloud economics, AI governance, infrastructure trade-offs, and career strategy—with the receipts to back it up. Think we got something wrong? Have better data? Open a pull request at platformengineeringplaybook.com. This is infrastructure podcasting as a living document, where the community keeps us honest and the content gets better with every contribution.
Read the playbook at https://platformengineeringplaybook.com
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Episodes
Sunday Nov 09, 2025
Sunday Nov 09, 2025
Your company spent $500K on AI-powered FinOps tools. The AI identified $3M in potential savings. Ninety days later, you've implemented $180K—just 6%. Jordan and Alex investigate why sophisticated AI that works perfectly still fails to reduce cloud waste, and reveal the organizational changes that the 6% who succeed actually implement. Get the 90-day playbook to shift from identifying waste to capturing value.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00019-finops-ai-paradox
Saturday Nov 08, 2025
Saturday Nov 08, 2025
Your team spent $500K on productivity tools. So why are engineers slower than last year? Jordan and Alex unpack the hidden crisis: 75% of teams lose 15 hours per week just switching between tools. Even worse—AI tools we adopted to boost productivity are making it worse. Discover why 53% of organizations escaped using Internal Developer Portals and get a 90-day playbook to fix it.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00018-devops-toolchain-crisis
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Friday Nov 07, 2025
Friday Nov 07, 2025
Learn how to configure Kubernetes health checks that prevent production outages. This episode covers the three types of probes (liveness, readiness, startup), production-appropriate timeouts, and the five most common health check mistakes that cause cascading failures.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/courses/kubernetes-production-mastery/lesson-03
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Thursday Nov 06, 2025
Thursday Nov 06, 2025
RBAC misconfiguration is the number one Kubernetes security vulnerability. Learn how to implement namespace-scoped RBAC roles, secure secrets management, and identify the 5 misconfigurations that consistently cause breaches. Production security that actually works.
🔗 Full lesson page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/courses/kubernetes-production-mastery/lesson-03
Wednesday Nov 05, 2025
Wednesday Nov 05, 2025
An in-depth analysis of cloud repatriation economics, examining real companies saving millions by leaving AWS. Jordan and Alex discuss 37signals' $2M annual savings, Dropbox's $74.6M optimization, hidden costs like egress fees ($90/TB) and NAT gateways, and when cloud still makes perfect sense.The article that inspired the podcast: https://rameerez.com/send-this-article-to-your-friend-who-still-thinks-the-cloud-is-a-good-idea/The Hackernews thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816041
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00015-cloud-repatriation-debate
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Tuesday Nov 04, 2025
Tuesday Nov 04, 2025
Kubernetes has 92% market share, but "do we actually need this?" is the loudest conversation in platform engineering. This episode explores the maturity paradox: service mesh revolution with ambient mode, AI/ML integration going mainstream, and decision frameworks for when to skip Kubernetes for simpler alternatives like Docker Swarm, Nomad, or PaaS.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00014-kubernetes-overview-2025
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Monday Nov 03, 2025
Monday Nov 03, 2025
Your team spent 9 months implementing Backstage. The portal looks beautiful. But internal adoption? 8%. Spotify's VP of Engineering has publicly acknowledged the 10% adoption problem—and here's why it happens. We break down the real $1M+ costs, compare Backstage vs Port vs Cortex vs custom portals, and give you the decision framework to choose the right path for your organization.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00013-backstage-adoption
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Thursday Oct 30, 2025
Thursday Oct 30, 2025
45% of platform teams measure nothing and get disbanded when they can't prove ROI. Jordan and Alex break down the exact ROI calculation framework that saved three platform teams from disbandment—with real numbers from startups to enterprises. Learn how to translate DORA metrics into dollars executives understand.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00012-platform-roi-calculator
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Tuesday Oct 28, 2025
Tuesday Oct 28, 2025
60-70% of platform engineering teams fail to deliver impact, with 45% disbanded within 18 months. We investigate why technically excellent teams with senior engineers and big budgets consistently fail—and uncover the shocking truth: it's not about technology. Learn the 5 predictive metrics that separate successful platforms from expensive failures, including the critical PM gap that explains Spotify's 99% adoption vs the industry's 10% average.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00011-platform-failures
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Tuesday Oct 28, 2025
Tuesday Oct 28, 2025
Your pods keep getting OOMKilled at the worst possible times. In this lesson, you'll master the difference between requests and limits, understand the three Quality of Service classes, and learn the five-step debugging workflow that prevents CrashLoopBackOff nightmares. Stop guessing at resource values—calculate them based on actual production metrics.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00010-kubernetes-production-mastery-lesson-02
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!