Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
July 30, 2026
In This Episode
Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso, working on Kratix, the open-source framework for building platforms, and its enterprise version, Syntasso Kratix Enterprise. Outside Syntasso she stays close to the community side of the field: she's a CNCF ambassador, a former lead of the CNCF platforms working group, a co-chair of recent KubeCons in Europe and North America, and a Team Topologies advocate.
Abby joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to discuss what a platform actually is: the layer that encodes your business onto your infrastructure, exposed through an API that lets the team behind it change how things work without forcing every other team to change with them. They cover why skills are "markdowns that say pretty please," the producer-versus-consumer marketplace model for platform engineering, and why template-driven infrastructure is the "puppy for Christmas" anti-pattern.
You’ll learn
Giving agents raw cloud credentials recreates the problems DevOps already exposed. The controls you'd add back, scoped permissions, cost labels, compliance reporting, amount to a platform whether you call it one or not.
A platform should hold what is unique to your business but common to your teams. The cloud already covers what's common to the industry; your investment pays off on the requirements shared across your teams.
Adopting skills is an architectural choice, and the least deterministic one available. A skill describes a workflow suggestively, while MCP servers, CLIs, and tools give an agent something more precise to work against.
For repeatable actions, don't make the agent reason through them every time. Have AI write the build script or Playwright test, then run it, removing the token cost and non-determinism.
The anti-pattern is handing users a template as the interface, not templates themselves. Once a Terraform module or Helm chart is the interface, ownership blurs and consumers have to learn your tooling. Abby calls it the "puppy for Christmas" problem.
An API layer is what makes a central team high-leverage. Hand infrastructure as code straight to users and a backend change forces the other 90% to change too; behind an API, only your 10% moves.
Quotes
Platforms should be what is unique to your business but common to your team.
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
If you're building internal platforms, they're what encodes your business onto the infrastructure, and you should build them like any other piece of software.
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
You might only have agents writing your software, but you're still having humans validate it, support it, interact with it. The agent isn't the only user of that platform. It's just maybe the primary coder within it.
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
At best it's the puppy-for-Christmas mentality. I've handed it to you, now it's yours, you figure it out. You've got four walks a day, vet bills, chewed-up shoes. But I wrote you this great template.
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
When your team, 10% of the org, changes something behind an API, only that 10% has to change. Hand infrastructure as code directly to users and you're asking the other 90% to change with you.
Abby Bangser
Principal Engineer at Syntasso
Timestamps
(01:18)
Abby's path through QA, SRE, and infrastructure to Kratix.
(02:10)
Why not skip golden paths and hand agents your AWS credentials?
(03:03)
Why the guardrails you'd add around an agent add up to a platform.
(05:03)
What "business requirements" really mean when provisioning infrastructure: cost, compliance, resilience, brand.
(07:45)
Platforms hold what's unique to your business but common to your teams.
(09:09)
A skill is essentially a "pretty please" markdown.
(10:30)
Agents as one consumer among many
(11:20)
Think of your platform as software / middleware
(13:09)
Using AI to write deterministic scripts and tests instead of reasoning every time.
(14:49)
Why the QA mindset is popular again.
(16:23)
Producers versus consumers, explained through Etsy's marketplace.
(20:17)
Whether one team can both run the marketplace and contribute to it
(22:53)
Platforms scale when outside experts contribute through a stable interface
(26:27)
Why handing users a template interface is an anti-pattern
(29:54)
Owning an API layer as the real source of leverage
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