We're hitting pause for the summer on new episodes of the Platform Engineering Podcast, but don’t worry, we’ve got some great episodes in the feed to keep you entertained in the meantime.

If you’ve got suggestions for guests or topics, please reach out — I’m always eager to annoy people into joining the conversation! Can’t wait to reconnect with you all soon!

Network calls fail in ways function calls never do - and once a monolith becomes microservices, reliability problems show up fast: retries amplify load, latency spikes cascade, and “what talks to what?” becomes hard to answer.

William Morgan, co-creator of Linkerd and the person who coined “service mesh,” breaks down what service meshes actually solve for platform teams running Kubernetes at scale. The conversation focuses on practical outcomes: improving reliability between services, getting uniform observability without rewriting every app, and handling gaps Kubernetes doesn’t cover well - like gRPC/HTTP2 load balancing and cross-environment communication.

Key topics

• Why reliability is the first “microservices tax” (timeouts, retries, backoff, cascading failure)
• What Kubernetes does not solve at the networking layer—and where a service mesh fits
• gRPC/HTTP2 load balancing problems and why L4 balancing can fall short
• Service-to-service visibility: understanding traffic flows and performance without per-app instrumentation
• Cost and resilience tradeoffs with multi-AZ Kubernetes on AWS (and how zonal-aware balancing can help)
• Whether developers should ever need to interact with service mesh configuration
• Where zero trust and policy controls belong: platform guardrails vs application ownership

Guest: William Morgan, CEO at Buoyant, Co-Creator of Linkerd

William Morgan brings a unique take on platform engineering, security, and traffic management in cloud native environments. William’s the mind behind Linkerd, the CNCF graduate service mesh born to make security, observability, and reliability "just work" for modern apps without all that heavy overhead. With roots as an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he was hands-on in the shift to microservices, and experience at Microsoft, Powerset, Adap.tv, and MITRE, William understands operational complexity better than most. His perspective on reducing unpredictable cloud spend with features like Linkerd’s High Availability Zonal Load Balancing is timely for any team wrestling with multi-AZ cloud bills.

William has hands-on knowledge of MCP, the protocol now critical for securing enterprise AI traffic. He also has strong views on sustainable open source business models, having contributed to open source for over 20 years.

William Morgan, BlueSky

Buoyant, Website

Buoyant, LinkedIn

Buoyant, YouTube

Linkerd, GitHub

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• The Service Mesh Landscape

When code gets cheaper to produce, feedback becomes the limiting factor - CI, reviews, and the handoffs between tools can quietly slow everything down.

Rob Zuber breaks down what platform engineers are seeing as teams adopt AI-assisted development: more branch builds, new failure modes, and growing pressure to shorten the loop between “change made” and “change validated.” He focuses on how CI can evolve from a human-first dashboard into a system that agents can interact with directly through APIs, CLIs, and MCP-style interfaces - so fixes can happen faster and with less waiting on manual triage.

Along the way, Rob and Cory dig into practical questions engineering leaders are wrestling with: how PR review becomes the next major bottleneck, what “agent experience” means in a delivery pipeline, why speed isn’t only about faster compute (it’s also about doing less unnecessary work), and how teams can share learnings so “agentic velocity” doesn’t only benefit a few power users.

If you’re building or running the systems that ship software, this is a clear look at where CI fits in an AI-accelerated workflow, and what needs to change to keep delivery safe, fast, and sustainable.

Guest: Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI

Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups, a four-time founder, and three-time CTO. Since joining CircleCI, Rob has seen the company through its Series F funding and delivered on product innovation at scale while leading a team of 300+ engineers who are distributed around the globe.

CircleCI, Website

CircleCI, LinkedIn

CircleCI, GitHub

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• “The Confident Commit” podcast
• Wardley Mapping
• “How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code.”