D2DO299: The State of Platform Engineering and DevEx

In this episode of Day 2 DevOps, host Ned Bellavance and co-host Kyler Middleton welcome Anam Shah, a cloud platform engineer at a British cosmetics brand, to discuss the evolving landscape of platform engineering and developer experience (DevEx). Anam shares her journey from on-premise infrastructure to platform engineering, highlighting how consultancy and product-led development shaped her career. She emphasizes the importance of treating internal developers as customers, fostering a blameless culture, and using innovative practices like 'engineering Kafka'—a team-building simulation using fictional scenarios—to drive collaboration and knowledge sharing. The conversation dives deep into how AI is transforming infrastructure as code (IaC), particularly through tools like Copilot, Claude, and the emerging Terraform MCP server, which can accelerate migrations, generate CI/CD pipelines, and refactor complex state files. Anam recounts using AI to migrate her personal projects from HCP Terraform to GitHub Actions, leveraging prompt engineering and multi-model workflows to improve accuracy and reduce hallucination. The hosts explore how AI helps bridge the gap between zero-to-one and day two challenges, especially in complex environments like AWS Control Tower and Azure Landing Zones, by simplifying policy understanding and enabling more agile, tailored infrastructure design. The episode concludes with a reflection on the balance between tooling, cost, and flexibility, and the growing role of AI in making platform engineering more adaptive and developer-centric.