Code RED

Platform engineering leader Rachael Wonnacott joins Code RED co-host Kasper Borg Nissen to explain why great platforms are defined by the experience they create for developers. Drawing on years of building internal platforms in large enterprises, she explains how poorly designed abstractions can turn a golden path into a golden cage, why reducing developer cognitive load often means transferring that complexity to the platform team, and how observability helps both sides understand what is happening beneath the abstraction. They also explore context-driven development: using platforms to give AI agents the architecture, constraints, and production signals they need to make better decisions.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Patrick Debois — Context-Driven Development: https://tessl.io/blog/context-development-lifecycle-better-context-for-ai-coding-agents/

Daniel Bryant — Golden Bricks (KubeCon NA 2024 talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhfQfQmnNd4

Rachael Wonnacott — The Conservation of Cognitive Load (FastFlow keynote): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4CTkModyEk

In this special launch episode, Dash0 Director of Product Evgeni Wachnowezki joins Mirko Novakovic to introduce Beyond Observability, Dash0’s vision for closing the loop from AI-generated code to production. They discuss why AI has shifted the bottleneck from writing code to safely shipping and operating it, and how Dash0 is building the control plane for that new reality. They also walk us through their new releases: AI Coding Insights, Agent0 Automations, AutoMerge and SignalControl.

Abdel Sghiouar, Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Google and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair, joins Kasper Borg Nissen to discuss what’s changing across the cloud-native ecosystem.

They explore why AI and agentic workloads are becoming a dominant theme in Kubernetes, why platform engineering teams are under more pressure than ever, and why the industry is still inventing best practices in real time.

Abdel also shares lessons from his career in developer advocacy and the basic formula for a great conference talk.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Kubernetes for agentic apps: A platform engineering perspective – https://platformengineering.org/blog/kubernetes-for-agentic-apps-a-platform-engineering-perspective

The Kubernetes Podcast: https://kubernetespodcast.com/

More from Abdel: https://linktr.ee/boredabdel

Heinrich Hartmann joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to share how Zalando runs their observability at an extraordinary scale. Heinrich explains why Zalando standardized on OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry across 3,500 microservices and 250 Kubernetes clusters, what it takes to process up to 60 million spans per second during Cyber Week, and how the team approaches sampling, cost control, and adaptive telemetry.
They also discuss the future of observability in the age of AI and Heinrich’s new conference, SignalsConf Berlin, which will focus on reliability and AI.

Buoyant CEO and creator of Linkerd William Morgan joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explore what happens when you instrument traffic at the service mesh layer. Drawing on his experience at Twitter, William explains how Linkerd gives platform teams HTTP and gRPC-level visibility without touching application code, why retry budgets help prevent cascade failures, and how workload identity creates a stronger foundation for security and observability. They also discuss MCP traffic, AI agents in production, and how observability needs to be re-optimized for LLMs.