#560 Why DevOps Alone Is No Longer Enough: Michael Ferranti on FeatureOps and Reliability

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/