Render founder/CEO Anurag Goel joins us for a look behind their platform. An application native hosting option that hides the lower levels still requires a LOT of infrastructure.

Marcos Nils has been into platform engineering for the best part of the last decade. He helped architect & build developer platforms using VMs & OpenStack, containers with Docker, and even Kubernetes. He did this at startups with 10 people, as well as large, publicly traded companies with 1000+ software engineers.

Today we talk with Marcos about the hard parts of platform engineering.

Why are the right values important for a company that changed the way the world builds software? How does pair programming help scale & maintain the company culture? What is it like to grow a company to 3000 employees over 30 years?

Today we have the privilege of Rob Mee, former CEO of Pivotal, the real home of Cloud Foundry and Concourse CI. Rob is now the CEO of Geometer.io, an incubator where Elixir is behind many great ideas executed well, including the US COVID response programme.

Gerhard’s transition to a senior engineer started 10 years ago, when he embraced the vim mindset, functional core & imperative shell, and was inspired to seek simplicity in his code & infrastructure. Most of it can be traced back to one person: Gary Bernhardt, the creator of Execute Program, Destroy all Software and the now famous Wat idea.

Few stick around long enough to understand the long-term impact of their decisions on production systems. Even fewer are able to talk about them as well as Gary does.

Today we talk with two lovely folks from Transistor.fm: Jason Pearl, Senior Software Developer & Jon Buda, co-founder. Gerhard was curious to find out about their setup & how did it change with the launch of the new podcast website builder. After all, you have been hearing us talk about our setup for years, so it was high-time to challenge some assumptions and learn how another team is solving similar problems.

TL;DL: keeping it simple is at the root of smooth operations & stable systems.

In our 6th Kaizen, we talk with Jerod about all the things that we cleaned up after migrating changelog.com from a managed Kubernetes to Fly.io. We deleted the K8s cluster and moved wildcard cert management to Fastly & all our vanity domain certs to Fly.io. We migrated the Docker Engine that our GitHub Actions is using - PR #416 has all the details. We did a few other things in preparation for our secrets plan. Thank you Maikel Vlasman, James Harr, Adrian Mester, Omri Gabay & Owen Valentine for kicking it off in our Slack #shipit channel.

Gerhard’s favourite improvement: the new shipit.show domain.

Today we talk to Mark Ericksen about all the things that we could be doing on the new platform - this is a follow-up to episode 50.

Mark specialises in Elixir, he hosts the Thinking Elixir podcast, and he also helps make Fly.io the best place to run Phoenix apps, such as changelog.com. In the interest of holding our new platform right, we thought that it would be a great idea to talk to someone that does this all day, every day, for many years now.

We touch up on how to run database migrations safely, and how to upgrade our application config to the latest Phoenix version. We also talked about some of the more advanced platform features that we may want to start leveraging, like the multi-region PostgreSQL.

This is our 5th Kaizen where we talk about the next improvement to changelog.com: we are now running on Fly.io and our PostgreSQL is managed. This is a migration that many were curious about, including Simmy de Klerk, the person that requested this episode.

After migrating all our media files to AWS S3 (check episode 40), we thought that this part was going to be easy. Plan met reality. Pull request 407 has all the details.

We want to emphasise the type of partner relationships that we seek at Changelog & why they are important to us, as well as to our listeners. Honeycomb & Fly embody the principles that we care about, and Gerhard thinks that we are currently missing a Kubernetes partner.