First Person Platform Episode 1 - Andrew Fong on Dropbox Grouper

So, I started a podcast. Kinda scary! But I guess that’s what startup life is like. At the previous KubeCon in Chicago, back in November, I realized that as part of my work on Otterize, I keep meeting cool people who have worked on workload authentication and authorization, and have stories to share that I found really interesting. And then it hit me: other engineers would nerd out at these stories too! So here we go.

Welcome to First Person Platform, a new podcast for platform engineers. We kick off with a brief series of episodes featuring engineers who have either spearheaded or led teams in building tools for secure workload and service access. Each episode takes a deep dive into the motivation behind building the system, its origin story, lessons learned throughout the process, and provides an opportunity to get to know the brilliant minds working behind the scenes!

Joining me for this first episode is Andrew Fong, the co-founder and CEO of Prodvana, and previously, VP Engineering Infrastructure at Dropbox. Andrew was in Infrastructure Engineering during the creation of Dropbox Grouper, and before then, was an SRE at YouTube and AOL.

Listen or watch below, and keep reading for more on this episode:

During this episode, we’ll be talking about Dropbox Grouper, the story and motivations behind building it, as well as funny and interesting stories from Andrew’s time at YouTube.

We dig into the cultural shift in platform and security, where developer experience is being prioritized, and the tension that creates in the organization, as well as AI and how it’s going to be affecting Platform Engineering.

A bit about Prodvana, Andrew's company:

Prodvana is revolutionizing how deployments are done, where you declare the desired outcome for your deployment, and the system figures out how to get there. One of Prodvana’s customers calls this an “intent-based” approach. You’ll notice this is similar in concept to the Intent-based Access Control concept behind Otterize, where you declare desired access and the system figures out the policy, and is actually what got us talking at KubeCon. :)