missionCTRL

missionCTRL

missionCTRL is a podcast hosted by Emin Alemdar and Joey Stout, two DevOps engineers who agree that most infra content is boring. If you're a platform engineer, DevOps practitioner, or just spend your life in all things IaC, this podcast was made for you. We're bringing real opinions, real arguments, and practitioner-level takes on whatever's on our mind that week. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Spacelift. https://spacelift.io/

Episodes

  1. Oct 22

    GitOps: or how we learned to stop worrying and love the process

    GitOps is infrastructure updates via pull request. Period. Or is it? In episode three of missionCTRL, Spacelift solutions architects Emin Alemdar and Joey Stout sit down with Tim Davis, Spacelift’s technical product marketing manager, to figure out what GitOps actually means and who gets to define it. They dig into where the term came from, the Kubernetes purist argument, and the gap between teams who think they’re doing GitOps and teams who really are. They also cover what good governance looks like (plan visibility, approvals, drift detection), whether AI belongs in the review loop, and when a team is ready to adopt the process. Along the way, Joey tells the story of an admin merge, a deleted node group, and the shame bell that followed. missionCTRL is brought to you by Spacelift, the infrastructure orchestration platform. Learn more at https://spacelift.io/. Follow missionCTRL on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. 00:27 - Intro 01:37 - What is GitOps? 06:36 - Common gaps and scaling infrastructure as code 08:21 - Tooling vs. process methodology 12:11 - Drift detection and auto-remediation 13:50 - Joey's war story 14:58 - The role of AI in GitOps reviews 17:01 - Fighting "green flag fatigue" and the shame bell 19:51 - GitOps' Kubernetes roots and evolution 23:11 - Pull request visibility and feature wishlist 26:04 - Are there use cases for NOT using GitOps? 28:28 - When is a team ready for GitOps? 34:08 - Closing thoughts

  2. Sep 24

    Kubernetes: the good, the bad, the ugly

    Kat Cosgrove, a member of the Kubernetes steering committee and the release lead behind the infamous "Uwubernetes" naming, joins Emin Alemdar and Joey Stout to talk about what Kubernetes actually does well, where it goes wrong, and where people misuse it entirely. They cover self-healing and portability as the real wins, why rolling your own cluster is usually a mistake, the case against reaching for Kubernetes when you don't need it, how the project handles documentation and AI-generated contributions, and whether a Kubernetes 2.0 is ever coming. Timestamps: 03:00 - Uwubernetes  05:44 - Release leads 07:54 - What the hell is Kubernetes? 11:23 - OpenShift, K3S, and other alternatives 19:16 - Kubernetes: The ugly 24:45 - Kubernetes documentation 29:42 - Kubernetes: The good 31:35 - How to get involved with Kubernetes 35:12 - Kubernetes AI policy 38:21 - The Future of Kubernetes 44:07 - Closing statements Follow missionCTRL for more episodes on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Brought to you by Spacelift: https://spacelift.io/

  3. Sep 23

    Rego isn’t hard, you’re just thinking about it wrong

    Solutions architects Emin Alemdar and Joey Stout take on the internet's most argued-about policy language: Rego. They settle the pronunciation debate (Rego vs. Reego, OPA vs. OPA), break down how rule blocks actually evaluate using a pizza-toppings example, and make the case that most "Rego haters" just haven't used it enough for it to click. Along the way: debugging tricks with the Rego Playground and AI, underrated tools like Conftest and Regal, and the surprising places OPA shows up in the wild (Google Calendar, for one). Follow missionCTRL for more episodes — on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Brought to you by Spacelift: https://spacelift.io/ 00:21 - Welcome to the first episode of missionCTRL 03:02 - First: pronunciations  04:40 - Rego and OPA overview 06:08 - JSON in, JSON out 09:34 - Explaining Rego with pizza 14:25 - Debugging Rego 18:20 - How and why to learn Rego 23:11 - Applying Rego and using other tools 26:36 - Rego resources 27:56 - Rego adoption 31:18 - Closing thoughts Resources: Our OPA video: https://youtu.be/x_IfmWXlHbI?si=rB2Ddu6z5SPjBxu2Our OPA blog post: https://spacelift.io/blog/open-policy-agent-regoOPA: https://www.openpolicyagent.org/CNCF: https://www.cncf.io/Rego Playground: https://play.openpolicyagent.org/Conftest: https://www.conftest.dev/Regal: https://www.openpolicyagent.org/ecosystem/entry/regal

  • 3 Episodes

About

missionCTRL is a podcast hosted by Emin Alemdar and Joey Stout, two DevOps engineers who agree that most infra content is boring. If you're a platform engineer, DevOps practitioner, or just spend your life in all things IaC, this podcast was made for you. We're bringing real opinions, real arguments, and practitioner-level takes on whatever's on our mind that week. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Spacelift. https://spacelift.io/

Information

  • Creator
    missionCTRL
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 missionCTRL
  • Show Website
    missionCTRL