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
Monday Oct 27, 2025
Monday Oct 27, 2025
Transform from a Kubernetes user into a production engineer. Learn the mental shift from development to production, identify the 5 failure patterns that break systems at scale, and apply the 6-item production readiness checklist that prevents outages.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00009-kubernetes-production-mastery-lesson-01
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Sunday Oct 26, 2025
Sunday Oct 26, 2025
GCP grows at 32% while AWS manages 17%—nearly 2x faster despite having half the services. We break down why Google's depth-over-breadth strategy is winning AI/ML and data workloads in 2025. Learn about 3x network performance advantages, automatic sustained use discounts (no Reserved Instance forecasting!), and when GCP's specialist positioning beats AWS's generalist approach.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00008-gcp-state-of-the-union-2025
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Saturday Oct 25, 2025
Saturday Oct 25, 2025
October 19, 2025. 11:48 PM: A DNS race condition in DynamoDB took down 70 AWS services for 14 hours, affecting 1,000+ companies and costing $75M/hour. We dissect the technical failure—how redundancy created the bug, why recovery triggered cascading collapse, and why AWS had no playbook for this scenario. Learn the architectural lessons about US-EAST-1 as global control plane and why multi-region suddenly looks like cheap insurance.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00007-aws-outage-october-2025
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Friday Oct 24, 2025
Friday Oct 24, 2025
AWS has over 200 services, but which 20 actually matter for your platform? We cut through the documentation maze to give you strategic service selection for compute, storage, databases, and networking in 2025. Learn why generic AWS knowledge pays $124K (B-tier) while specialized expertise in Lambda, Redshift, or Redis commands $127K-$139K (A/S-tier)—and get the decision framework to choose the right abstraction layer for your team.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00006-aws-state-of-the-union-2025
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Thursday Oct 23, 2025
Thursday Oct 23, 2025
Which platform engineering skills command $24,000+ higher salaries? We analyze 220+ tools from the Dice 2025 Tech Salary Report, break down the commoditization trap catching most engineers, and reveal S-tier specializations earning $130K-152K. Discover why Elasticsearch engineers out-earn Azure architects by $24K, and get practical 18-month roadmaps to move from B-tier to S-tier compensation.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00005-platform-tools-tier-list
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub!
Wednesday Oct 22, 2025
Wednesday Oct 22, 2025
Everyone promises Heroku-like simplicity with cloud-scale performance, but which PaaS actually delivers? We break down real-world costs for identical workloads: Flightcontrol at $400/month vs Vercel at $1,010 vs Railway at $41. The AWS complexity tax is real—teams spend 30% of infrastructure time just maintaining deployment pipelines. Discover when paying $397/month saves you $175K/year, and when building your own infrastructure actually makes sense.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00004-paas-showdown
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub to contribute your perspective!
Tuesday Oct 21, 2025
Tuesday Oct 21, 2025
Enterprise teams manage 130+ tools but only use 10-20% of their capabilities. Engineers juggle 16 monitoring tools on average—40 when SLAs get strict. Context switching alone costs $71K per engineer per year. We expose the real economics of platform engineering: why traditional ROI metrics lie, how to calculate actual costs vs perceived savings, and the Monday-morning actions that stop the bleeding.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00003-platform-economics
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub to contribute your perspective!
Monday Oct 20, 2025
Monday Oct 20, 2025
AWS still dominates at 32% market share, but new deployments tell a different story. Platform abstractions (Vercel, Fly.io, Railway) mean developers never touch AWS directly. GPU shortages made Lambda Labs a major player overnight. Edge platforms deliver sub-50ms latency globally as the default. We break down the technical differences between AWS, Google, and Azure—networking architectures, database philosophies, operational complexity—and explore specialized clouds crushing specific domains. Plus: what skills matter now (FinOps, GitOps, multi-cloud architecture) versus what's becoming table stakes (basic Kubernetes, Terraform).
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00002-cloud-providers
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub to contribute your perspective!
Sunday Oct 19, 2025
Sunday Oct 19, 2025
85% of organizations are facing a crisis: employees adopting AI tools 890% faster than IT can assess them. The "just block it" approach fails 100% of the time, but we've found teams reducing false alerts by 96% and cutting costs 60% with the right governance strategy. Discover the counterintuitive approach that actually works, real ROI from AIOps, and why your blocking strategy is making your best engineers leave.
🔗 Full episode page: https://platformengineeringplaybook.com/podcasts/00001-ai-platform-engineering
📝 See a mistake or have insights to add? This podcast is community-driven - open a PR on GitHub to contribute your perspective!