Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron

Terraform drift, state wrangling, and a growing “tools for tools” stack are still daily work for many platform teams - despite a decade of DevOps talk and cloud maturity. Why does ops automation so often feel like it needs babysitting?

Pavlo Baron breaks down where Infrastructure as Code tends to break down in real organizations: manual drift management, low-level state complexity, and a lack of practical abstractions that let developers self-serve without inheriting the entire ops burden.

The conversation digs into what a more use-case-driven approach could look like - where teams can choose when to enforce desired state, when to accept emergency changes, and how to build “guardrails” that reduce mistakes without slowing delivery.

Pavlo also explains why type safety and constrained interfaces matter (especially as AI starts generating more code and infrastructure changes), and why the future of platform engineering depends less on slogans and more on systems that reduce toil.

Guest: Pavlo Baron, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs

Pavlo Baron is Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, who are crafting tools to remove the toil from the operations work, with a current focus on infrastructure. He is a veteran in the space, having served in all kinds of roles throughout his career that spans more than 35 years. Previously, he was co-founder, CTO, and major inventor at an observability startup, Instana, that was acquired by IBM in 2020. Pavlo is a frequent conference speaker and author of several books.

Pavlo Baron, X

https://pavlobaron.medium.com/

https://github.com/platform-engineering-labs

https://www.linkedin.com/company/platform-engineering-labs

https://x.com/plateng_labs

https://bsky.app/profile/platform.engineering

https://mastodon.social/@plateng_labs

https://www.youtube.com/@plateng-labs

Links to interesting things from this episode:

1. The Pkl Primer
2. formae
3. formae quick start
4. "10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr"
5. “Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.” Albert Bandura
6. JPL “Visions of the Future”
7. “Fallout: New Vegas”