The ideal state of a cloud native shop is to run a development and deployment pipeline that can seamlessly move applications from the developer’s laptop to the data center (or the edge) without any manual intervention. And while there are many tools available to facilitate such automation — Helm, Operators, CI/CD toolchains, GitOps architectures, Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform — all too often edge cases and exceptions still require personal attention, bringing DevOps pipelines to a halt. The missing pieces of the puzzles are a control plane and a unified application model for the control plane to run upon, asserted Phil Prasek, a principal product manager at Upbound, in this latest episode of The New Stack Context podcast. Prasek envisions a time when organizations can build their own customized set of platform services, where developers can draw from a self-serve portal the building blocks they need — be they containerized applications or third party cloud services, and have the resulting app run uniformly in multiple environments. “Within an enterprise control plane, you can basically have your own abstractions, and then you can publish them,” Prasek said. TNS Editorial and Marketing Director Libby Clark hosts this episode, with the help of TNS Senior Editor Richard MacManus, and TNS Managing Editor Joab Jackson.