IT Ops Query

Renowned public speaker, industry commentator, technologist and open source ambassador Kelsey Hightower describes himself as an AI skeptic, but warns that platform engineers should take the threat of AI to their jobs seriously. In this episode, he explains the skills IT operations leaders must emphasize as they prepare for the question: "What value do you bring over the machines?"

Featuring: Kelsey Hightower, technologist, speaker ...

Last year in AWS with Corey Quinn

To paraphrase David Letterman, this next guest needs no introduction, at least for many people in the cloud computing world: Corey Quinn is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills "by making them smaller and less horrifying," according to his website bio. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts and ...

Brett Smith, distinguished software developer at AI and data management software and services company SAS, has spent nine of his 13 years with the company focused on software supply chain security, managing DevSecOps and compliance for a 3,000-developer organization. He shares the good, the bad and the ugly of the journey to date, and his outlook for the future.

Featuring: Brett Smith, distinguished software developer, SAS

In today...

You might recognize Rob Strechay from his appearances on TheCube livestreaming videos during industry conferences, but he's worn many hats in the industry over the years. In this wide-ranging discussion, he looks back at how AI data management evolved in 2025, and predicts that AI "governance, security and data quality are going to be all the rage in 2026."

Featuring: Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at TheCube...

As it rolled out AI and AIOps, Salesforce shunned the cloud repatriation route and instead expanded its public cloud presence with Hyperforce. Paul Constantinides, an engineering leader at Salesforce for more than 21 years, currently leads engineering for Hyperforce. In this episode, he details the evolution of the Salesforce internal platform over the years, what was behind the decision to launch Hyperforce, his team's extensive u...

Rob Hirschfeld is the CEO and co-founder of RackN, founded in 2014, focused on "addressing the messy challenge of operating at scale in physical data centers," according to his LinkedIn profile. Hirschfeld has had a front-row seat to the last decade of conversations in enterprise IT ops about bare-metal server operations and cloud repatriation, topics that remain hot as some enterprises look to move AI inference workloads on-premis...

Yuval Fernbach has more than a decade of hands-on experience in the realm of data and machine learning, and served as the co-founder and CTO of Qwak from 2020 until it was acquired by JFrog in 2024. Fernbach is now vice president and CTO of JFrog ML, a subset of the JFrog software supply chain management toolset focused on AI and machine learning operations, or MLOps. In this interview, he discusses the unique challenges generative...

Enterprise service management platform vendor ServiceNow has been one of the most assertive in the industry in developing its AI agent products over the past 14 months. Our guest, Dorit Zilbershot, has been with ServiceNow for six years, serving in various product management leadership roles focused on AI. In this interview, she shares recent ServiceNow AI model development news with Nvidia, how enterprise AI agent adoption has dev...

The director of engineering for a Fortune 20 automotive company shares his thoughts on the latest in cloud-native technologies for platform engineers during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025. He also discusses ways platform engineering can address common cybersecurity risks, including software supply chain security. Finally, Saxena gives his insights on the opportunities and challenges AI presents for platform engineering...

Bob Killen, senior technical program manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), shares highlights from two survey reports released this week during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025: The 2025 State of Cloud Native Development report and AI Tech Radar Report. According to Killen, the results show that cloud-native technology has become more accessible to back-end developers, and that AI development is closely...

Oracle senior vice president Sudha Raghavan manages all expansions and new buildouts for some of the world's largest infrastructure platforms supporting GPU clusters, including network design. As the company prepares to build new gigawatt data centers worldwide, she explains how its database heritage helps in operating increasingly demanding data center networks with high performance and efficiency.

Featuring: Sudha Raghavan, senio...

It's our first on-location episode! At GitHub Universe, Katie Norton, Research Manager for IDC's DevSecOps and software supply chain security practice, explains how a new extension to GitHub's CodeQL reflects increased awareness of security as a dimension of code quality. She also discusses the shifting strategic partnerships and competition that come with increased convergence between AppSec and QA workflows, along with the AI sec...

Patrick Lin from Splunk discusses how observability extends beyond IT, highlighting its importance in improving business decisions, customer support, and revenue. The interview also covers challenges in enterprise observability, like standardization and teamwork, along with the changing role of AI in observability methods. AI automation can help observability practitioners keep up with increasingly complex infrastructure, but custo...

Observability and security company Cribl has had a front-row seat to the rise of generative AI, AI agents, and their impact on data management in IT. The company, which grew from log management into federated search, a data pipeline, a data lake, and a cloud-based managed service, also expanded its product offerings this week with notebooks for observability experts, a Model Context Protocol server, and support for bring-your-own-A...

What a difference six months makes: after adjusting its product pricing and bundling in April during its Team 25 US conference, Atlassian now says adoption for its Rovo AI products has taken off. The company's head of AI product talks about what changed, what's new at the Team 25 Europe conference this week, and what's ahead for Atlassian AI.

Featuring: Jamil Valliani, vice president and head of AI product at Atlassian

In today’s e...

The leader of search, observability, and cloud operations at Amazon Web Services outlines her strategic perspective on monitoring AI agent systems such as Amazon Bedrock Agents. Ultimately, she envisions unified visibility, including security, across AI workflows, from silicon to application, both inside and outside AWS.

Featuring: Nandini Ramani, Vice President at Amazon Web Services

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

• Generativ...

Experienced IT practitioners offer their predictions for how AI will change observability, the role of the site reliability engineer and incident management within enterprise organizations, from best-case scenarios to pitfalls and risks. Come for the 40 combined years of IT ops expertise, stay for the "Highlander" references and football analogies.

Featuring: Jonathan Moore, domain architect, Progressive Insurance and Laura Vetter,...

Ameet Talwalkar joined observability vendor Datadog in February to lead a new AI research lab at the company. He is also an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. One of the first projects from the lab was released to open source in May – Toto, a foundation model trained on real-world observability data. Talwalkar discusses how Toto could improve observability forecasting tools such as Datadog's Watchdog, and does some ...

Steve Koelpin is a seasoned engineer and award-winning data strategist who specializes in observability, logging, and data pipelines at high scale. In his experience, generative AI in observability tools can help reduce the time it takes to resolve IT incidents, but can also foment dependence on a 'black box' tool. There's also the matter of feeding AI the large amounts of data it requires without breaking the bank, where Koelpin s...