In this episode of The CTO Show with Mehmet, Mehmet sits down with Michael Ferranti, a seasoned tech executive and product leader at Unleash, to explore why DevOps alone can no longer meet the reliability, speed, and risk demands of modern software systems.
From real-world outages at Google and Cloudflare to the rise of AI-driven delivery, this conversation introduces FeatureOps as the missing control plane that allows teams to move faster without breaking production.
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👤 About the Guest
Michael Ferranti is a tech executive with over a decade of experience across DevOps tooling, infrastructure software, open source, and enterprise platforms. He has played key roles in scaling developer-focused technologies and advises organizations on balancing innovation, reliability, and governance at scale. Today, he focuses on FeatureOps as a foundational capability for modern engineering teams.
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🧠 Key Takeaways
• DevOps optimizes deployment, but FeatureOps governs runtime behavior
• Many large-scale outages are caused by “big bang” releases without kill switches
• Feature flags are not just for UI experiments, they are safety mechanisms
• FeatureOps enables faster shipping and lower risk at the same time
• AI-driven engineering increases the need for runtime control, not less
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🎯 What You’ll Learn
• Why DevOps alone breaks down at scale
• How FeatureOps differs from traditional feature flagging
• Lessons from Google and Cloudflare outages
• When open source helps and when it complicates GTM
• How AI changes release management and reliability decisions
• Why human-in-the-loop control still matters in autonomous systems
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⏱️ Episode Highlights & Timestamps
• 00:02 – Michael’s journey from early cloud evangelism to FeatureOps
• 04:00 – Scaling Portworx and why technology alone is not enough
• 07:30 – Open source as a GTM strategy, myths and realities
• 15:00 – Kubernetes, scale assumptions, and overengineering traps
• 21:30 – What FeatureOps actually is and why it matters
• 24:30 – Google outage case study and the cost of big bang releases
• 27:30 – Cloudflare, kill switches, and runtime control
• 31:00 – FeatureOps vs DevOps explained clearly
• 35:00 – AI in release decisions and risk management
• 43:00 – Human-in-the-loop engineering and future architectures
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🔗 Resources Mentioned
• Unleash Feature Management Platform: https://www.getunleash.io/
• Google SRE Handbook
• DORA Reports on High-Performing Engineering Teams
• ThoughtWorks Feature Management Practices
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🔗 Connect with the Guest
• Michael Ferranti on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferrantim/