More Software Engineering Radio episodes
Published 26 Feb 2026
Duration: 01:05:02
Building and scaling on-premises cloud infrastructure is plagued by hardware and firmware issues, legacy component limitations, and operational complexity.
Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at s...
The podcast examines the difficulties of constructing and expanding on-premises cloud infrastructure, focusing on how abstraction of hardware by software developers can lead to complex problems, as exemplified by Samsung's acquisition of Joyant for its cloud capabilities. Key challenges include hardware and firmware issues such as severe input/output latency caused by faulty Toshiba drives, illustrating the difficulty of managing large-scale integrated systems. It also addresses limitations in legacy server components, like Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs), which present operational and security issues due to outdated, closed-source designs. The discussion contrasts the relative simplicity of public cloud platforms like AWS with the complexity of on-premises deployments, emphasizing the need for full control and integration across all system layers. Additionally, the importance of scalable control planes, the challenges of using JavaScript in large-scale systems, and the shift toward more reliable programming languages like Rust are explored, along with the advantages of using open-source tools in the development of modern cloud infrastructure.
13 May 2026 SE Radio 720: Martin Dilger on Understanding Eventsourcing
Recommended: Useful Architectural Pattern.
Event sourcing is a system design approach that records changes as sequential events to ensure historical traceability, uses event modeling for aligning systems with human workflows, contrasts with CRUD architectures, and emphasizes slice-based design, event streams, and practical applications like legacy modernization and workflow simplification.
6 May 2026 Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE
AI agents in SRE leverage autonomous decision-making, agentic search, and lightweight architectures to replace static runbooks, balancing autonomy with reliability challenges, context management, and human oversight in dynamic environments.
29 Apr 2026 Will Sentance on JS Modernization
JavaScript's evolution from a 1995 scripting language to a performance-optimized modern tool balances innovation with backward compatibility through TC39's incremental updates, browser advancements, community-driven libraries, key features like async/await and symbols, engine optimizations, and a design philosophy prioritizing flexibility and user-driven standardization for large-scale frameworks.
23 Apr 2026 Eric Tschetter on Decoupling Observability
Recommended: Telemetry is important, avoiding vendor lockin is even more important.
Observability in microservices emphasizes decoupled architectures over traditional frameworks to address vendor lock-in, data interoperability, and scalability challenges, while balancing unstructured telemetry management, query language standardization, and cross-team collaboration.
15 Apr 2026 Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software
Local First Software combines local data storage with cloud collaboration to enable offline access, real-time editing, and seamless syncing via AutoMerge and CRDTs, prioritizing user control, privacy, and decentralized workflows with future focus on open standards and AI integration.