Infrastructure as Code's Hidden Problem with Pavlo Baron

Terraform drift, state wrangling, and a growing “tools for tools” stack are still daily work for many platform teams - despite a decade of DevOps talk and cloud maturity. Why does ops automation so often feel like it needs babysitting? Pavlo Baron breaks down where Infrastructure as Code tends to break down in real organizations: manual drift management, low-level state complexity, and a lack of practical abstractions that let developers self-serve without inheriting the entire ops burden. The conversation digs into what a more use-case-driven approach could look like - where teams can choose when to enforce desired state, when to accept emergency changes, and how to build “guardrails” that reduce mistakes without slowing delivery. Pavlo also explains why type safety and constrained interfaces matter (especially as AI starts generating more code and infrastructure changes), and why the future of platform engineering depends less on slogans and more on systems that reduce toil. Guest: Pavlo Baron , Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs Pavlo Baron is Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, who are crafting tools to remove the toil from the operations work, with a…