Breaking Down Healthcare Delivery Barriers with Joel Vasallo

Platform Engineering Podcast

Feeling overwhelmed by the number of apps you need to manage while building developer trust, managing costs, and trying to create an extensible platform that teams actually want to use?

Joel Vasallo shares practical insights from scaling TAG's platform engineering initiatives across multiple healthcare organizations. Learn how his team transformed deployment times from weeks to minutes while maintaining security and compliance. Joel breaks down the journey from initial Kubernetes adoption to managing 70+ applications.

Listeners will gain actionable strategies for:

• Starting small with platform initiatives and building organic buy-in
• Balancing standardization with team autonomy
• Managing cloud costs across multiple organizations
• Building trust through visibility and auditability

Whether you're in healthcare or any regulated industry, this conversation provides a practical roadmap for evolving your platform engineering practice.

Guest: Joel Vasallo, Senior Director of Platform Engineering at TAG

Joel is the Senior Director of Platform Engineering at TAG - The Aspen Group where he leads teams focused on DevOps, SRE, and Delivery Engineering. Together, these teams aim to build and architect highly available cloud environments, develop infrastructure and development tools, and empower developers through fully automated deployment pipelines. In his spare time, he runs monthly meetups in Chicago through the Google Developers program. When he isn’t working, he loves exploring Sweet Home Chicago!

Joel Vasallo - X

Joel Vasallo - Medium

The Aspen Group (TAG)

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• Argo
• Istio
• Solo
• Prometheus
• Karpenter
• “From $erverless to Elixir”
• Duckbill
• Corey Quinn
• Malört