Guest Host: Kelsey Hightower - Beyond Pipelines: Infrastructure As Data

About this episode

Kelsey Hightower discusses the challenges of CI/CD and GitOps in infrastructure provisioning and introduces the concept of infrastructure as data.

Is your Git repo really the source of truth for infrastructure - or just a suggestion? Guest host Kelsey Hightower sits down with Cory O’Daniel to unpack why many teams hit dead ends with CI/CD for provisioning, where GitOps struggles with drift, and when TicketOps helps or hurts. They explore a different model: infrastructure as data with typed contracts, shared artifacts, and workflows that embed policy, validation, and upgrades from the start. You’ll hear practical ways to reduce cognitive load for developers while giving operations reliable control and better day‑2 levers. You’ll learn: Why pipelines are a poor fit for infra provisioning and what to do instead How to reason about drift as a three‑way merge with reality When reconciliation helps, and when it breaks production firefights How typed contracts and artifacts connect modules and teams without glue scripts Ways to present safer self‑service without requiring everyone to learn Terraform A simple mental model for treating TicketOps as a surface, not the workflow Guest Host:  Kelsey Hightower Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen…

People in this episode

Host: Cory O'Daniel

Guest: Kelsey Hightower

Topics covered

• infrastructure as data
• CI/CD
• GitOps
• TicketOps
• developer experience
• policy validation

Keywords

• infrastructure
• GitOps
• CI/CD
• TicketOps
• provisioning
• drift
• self-service
• typed contracts

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, Google Cloud Platform

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