[2026 kcdc] keep It dull, keep It running: runbooks, routines, and the religion of boring platforms

Speaker: Prerit Munjal

See live blog table of contents for more posts


What want at 2am

  • Consistency
  • Clarity
  • Muscle memory

Groupon’s road to being AI native

  • local experiences marketplace
  • Project Foundry – AI Native operating model
  • One assistant for every employee – Claude. Company default since July 2026
  • 11 people, 12 hours for a migration to a different cloud. 10x lower than years back.

Platform Engineering

  • Don’t need if startup/small company
  • GCP console is good enough
  • Don’t have layers yet
  • DevOps created problems vs solving problem. Now spending more money
  • Platform engineering is everyone’s job but nobody agrees on what it is.

Ai

  • Can’t build the platform for the next 3 years.
  • Know what agents will look like for 6 months

Other problems

  • Don’t want developers creating own account and deploying to it
  • When too many layers, get slower replies
  • Adoption you have to force is a layer you added
  • A platform is a layer unless it removes/replaces one

CI/CD

  • $28K a year for Jenkins
  • GitHub actions much cheaper
  • Developers don’t want to switch because so different
  • Setup agent to write GitHub Actions equivalent, test it and create the PR

Incident

  • Most of an incident is not the fix
  • Times goes to contacting person, gathering and analyzing relevant data
  • Much of time is spent on tasks that can be automated
  • Incidents generally happen a while after deployment because have headroom from when was working
  • Incident is the state a platform is in.

Sample of things to track

  • Deployment activity
  • Who reading PRs
  • Success rate of deployments
  • Who tried to deploy when

Other notes

  • https://herdr.dev – embedded in platform
  • platform vs cli
  • Stateful alerts are moe useful than stateless pings
  • Nobody talks about prompt engineering anymore. Then context engineering. Now harness engineering

Claude

  • Suggested downloading talk, feeding to Claude and pointing it at your codbase

Trusted automation

  • Budgetted
  • Loud by default
  • Exercised on a schedule
  • Degrades to the manual path
  • Distributable

My take

I had trouble paying attention to this session, but not the speakers fault. Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11 (I’m from NYC). A lot of reflection during the window when everything happened. The content was fine although I would have liked a bigger font (I was in the second row and it was small). That compounded the problem because easier to get distracted.

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