The Evolution Of Platform Engineering With Massdriver CEO Cory O’Daniel

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May 27, 2025

Cory O’Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Massdriver with a background in IaC and DevOps. He traces platform engineering’s evolution and why operations should become software. He critiques public IaC abstractions and explains building prescriptive modules that encode security and business rules. He discusses AI’s current limits for ops and how secure-by-default modules handle edge cases pragmatically.

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ANECDOTE

Early EC2 Migration Shaped Career

Cory recounts being surprised with leading a migration to EC2 early in his career at about 24 years old.
That project pushed him into the DevOps space and shaped his career focus on operations and infra-as-code.

ADVICE

Talk To Customers Before You Build

Do get out and talk to customers early and often instead of only building in isolation.
Listen more than you code to validate demand and iterate based on disconfirming feedback.

INSIGHT

Ops Should Ship Products, Not Config

The valuable form of DevOps is ops teams producing products developers consume, not forcing developers to become ops experts.
Platform engineering formalizes this by building APIs and tooling as software artifacts for devs.

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Episode Summary

Dive into the ever-evolving world of platform engineering with Cory O’Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Massdriver. This episode explores the journey of DevOps, the challenges of building and scaling infrastructure, and the crucial role of creating effective abstractions to empower developers. Cory shares his insights on the shift towards platform engineering as a means to build more secure and efficient software by default.

Show Notes

In this episode of The Secure Developer, host Danny Allan sits down with Cory O’Daniel, CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, to discuss the dynamic landscape of platform engineering. Cory, a seasoned software engineer and first-time CEO, shares his extensive experience in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) space, tracing his journey from early encounters with EC2 to founding Massdriver. He offers candid advice for developers aspiring to become CEOs, emphasizing the importance of passion and early customer engagement.

The conversation delves into the evolution of DevOps over the past two decades, highlighting the constant changes in how software is run, from mainframes to serverless containers and now AI. Cory argues that the true spirit of DevOps lies in operations teams producing products that developers can easily use. He points out the challenge of scaling operations expertise, suggesting that IT and Cloud practices need to mature in software development to create better abstractions for developers, rather than expecting developers to become infrastructure experts.

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the current state of abstractions in IaC. Cory contends that existing public abstractions, like open-source Terraform modules, are often too generic and don't account for specific business logic, security, or compliance requirements. He advocates for operations teams building their own prescriptive modules that embed organizational standards, effectively shifting security left by design rather than by burdening developers. The episode also touches upon the potential and limitations of AI in the operations space, with Cory expressing skepticism about AI's current ability to handle the contextual complexities of infrastructure without significant, organization-specific training data. Finally, Cory shares his optimism for the future of platform engineering, viewing it as a return to the original intentions of DevOps, where operations teams ship software with ingrained security and compliance, leading to more secure systems by default.

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