Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Platform Engineering in the Age of AI

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Sam Newman: Introduction (5 minutes)

Sam Newman welcomes you to the Infrastructure & Ops Superstream.

Platform Engineering for Agentic AI – Abdel Sghiouar (35 minutes)

Agentic AI isn't just a buzzword; it's a fundamental shift in software. These intelligent, goal-driven applications operate autonomously, presenting unprecedented challenges for infrastructure teams. The old ways of building and running apps simply won’t scale. Join Abdel Sghiouar, developer advocate at Google Cloud, to explore how the power of Kubernetes combined with modern platform engineering principles can create a scalable, resilient, and observable foundation for your next-generation intelligent applications.

Building an AI Agent: From Internal Tool to Platform Advantage – Jordan Lewis (Sponsored by Cockroach Labs) (30 minutes)

How do you operationalize AI tooling so that it’s reliable enough for daily use, secure enough to trust with internal data, cost-efficient enough to scale, and accessible enough that nontechnical teams can actually benefit from it? Jordan Lewis, VP of engineering at Cockroach Labs, shares his experience designing and deploying Mica, an internal AI agent that brings the power of LLMs to engineering, knowledge work, and enterprise-ready business workflows. He’ll take you through decisions that shaped Mica’s platform architecture, from managing LLM inference costs and latency to building guardrails that keep sensitive information internal, as well as how using a distributed database like CockroachDB made the process easier. Get a perspective on what operational excellence, security, compliance, centralized telemetry, and cost control look like when AI moves from proof of concept to production platform at the enterprise level.

This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Jordan.

Break (5 minutes)

Platform Engineering for Developers, Architects & the Rest of Us – Daniel Bryant (35 minutes)

Join Daniel Bryant to explore the core goals of platform engineering for the software developer and architect communities. Understand “what good looks like” with a successful platform build and how a platform can influence the SDLC (for better or worse!).

Governance Without The Red Tape – Sarah Wells (35 minutes)

When you hear “governance,” you might think of red tape, bureaucracy, or someone telling you what you can’t do. But real governance is about alignment and reducing technical risk. And that matters more than ever. Join Sarah Wells to understand how to reduce risk, improve decision-making, and keep your organization running smoothly—without slowing your teams down.

Break (5 minutes)

The Fourth Signal: Why Evals Belong in Your Observability Stack – Ben O’Mahony (35 minutes)

Evals are the correctness signal that OTel doesn’t have. They’re not a test tool, they're the fourth pillar alongside logs, metrics, traces. Pass rate over time is your SLO. Error budget burn is eval regression. Join principal AI engineer Ben O’Mahony to understand why evals belong in your observability stack.

Fireside Chat with Nathen Harvey (35 minutes)

Join Sam Newman and Nathen Harvey, DORA team lead at Google Cloud, for this fireside chat around the role of platform engineering in the era of AI. Topics might include why AI necessitates a platform model, or how a strong internal platform can help unlock the impact of AI. Come prepared with questions to ask Nathen and Sam.

Sam Newman: Closing Remarks (5 minutes)

Sam Newman closes out today’s event.