In this exclusive VMblog Q&A ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, Dimitri Vlachos, Chief Marketing Officer at Spacelift, discusses how the company's infrastructure orchestration platform is helping DevOps and Platform teams balance the critical challenge of increasing developer velocity while ensuring infrastructure remains secure, resilient, and compliant.

As a silver sponsor at the event, Spacelift will be showcasing their latest research on infrastructure automation, revealing a significant gap between perception and reality in the industry – while 45% of organizations believe they've achieved high levels of automation, only 14% demonstrate true excellence in this area.

VMblog:  Can you give us your elevator pitch?  What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year?  What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision makers?

Dimitri Vlachos:  At Spacelift, we are in the business of helping companies use infrastructure automation to help their businesses go as fast as they can while maintaining control. DevOps and Platform Teams are struggling with the "Speed-Control Paradox": how to increase developer velocity while making sure that infrastructure is safe, resilient and compliant. That's extremely hard to do when infrastructure complexity continues to rise. But we're here to help. With the Spacelift infrastructure orchestration platform, you can manage the entire infrastructure lifecycle with a single, integrated workflow that provisions, configures and governs, and works seamlessly across on-premises and cloud.

VMblog:  Where can attendees find you at the event, and what do you have in store for participants?

Vlachos:  Spacelift is a silver sponsor at KubeCon EU, and we'll be exhibiting at booth N560. We'll be offering demos of the Spacelift platform, of course, and we'll be sharing the findings of a commissioned research report on the state of infrastructure automation.

VMblog:  Are you hosting any special events, meetups, or after-hours gatherings during KubeCon?  Can you give us the details and links?

Vlachos:  Yes, Spacelift is once again the diamond sponsor of OpenTofu Day. We invite everyone to join us on April 1, the day before the main event kicks off, to share a day all about OpenTofu, including migrations, technical details, panels, and new use cases. This is a great opportunity to learn, contribute, and join the OpenTofu community. Learn more and register at https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/co-located-events/opentofu-day/

VMblog:  Can you walk us through a typical customer journey? What specific pain points do you address?

Vlachos:  "The State of Infrastructure Automation," the research report we're sharing at KubeCon, speaks directly to this issue. In our research, we discovered that there is a huge gap between perception and reality when it comes to infrastructure automation: While 45% of organizations believe they have achieved a high level of infrastructure automation, only 14% exhibit the behavior and technology patterns of infrastructure automation excellence. In particular, the survey confirmed that even with good tools and a platform team in place, balancing speed and control remains a challenge - especially at scale.

By comparing each company's state of adoption to the results they have achieved, we were able to identify stages along the adoption continuum, or "a typical customer journey," if you will. "Experimenters" are starting to test out some tools. "Adopters" have implemented some automation but are struggling with standardization and governance. "Optimizers" comprise the more progressive companies that have made significant progress with automated deployments and governance. They are focusing now on addressing gaps in security, compliance and scalability. And, finally, the "Leaders" have automation, security, compliance and scalability built into every process.

At Spacelift, we meet you wherever you are on this journey. Our platform integrates with all of your existing tools and helps you move forward to master the "Speed-Control Paradox."

VMblog:  What's your top piece of advice for attendees to make the most of KubeCon 2025?

Vlachos:  My top piece of advice would be to check out our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe: London 2025 Guide. My second piece of advice would be to encourage attendees who are interested in infrastructure automation to download a copy of our research report and take advantage of our free assessment tool. Come see us at Booth N560, and let's talk about how Spacelift can help you make progress in your automation journey.

VMblog:  Can you double click on your company's technologies?  And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Vlachos:  DevOps and platform engineering teams visiting KubeCon increasingly struggle with the tradeoffs between speed of deployment and control over their infrastructure environments. We call this the Speed-Control Paradox. Spacelift serves this market by helping organizations move beyond a hodge-podge of disunified and nearly impossible-to-scale automation attempts to a more unified state of automation where provisioning, configuration and governance are orchestrated in a single, integrated workflow.

The Spacelift orchestration platform manages the entire infrastructure lifecycle and integrates all infrastructure automation tooling so that teams can move at the speed developers demand, while maintaining security, governance and cost control. The platform integrates with the tools teams are already using-i.e., any major Infrastructure-as-Code tool, cloud platform, observability tools, control and governance solutions, and the VCS provider where teams store infrastructure code-and ties it all together. The platform brings infrastructure pipelines to life by making it easy to create workflows that combine IaC for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management, and policies for governance.  Pre-configured blueprints can be offered to developers for self-service, and developers can have access to Spacelift workflows directly from Kubernetes, with the Kubernetes Operators.

VMblog:  In an increasingly crowded cloud-native and Kubernetes market, what makes your solution stand out in 2025? What makes it unique or differentiating?

Vlachos:  Spacelift sets itself apart via a platform solution that integrates the most popular of infrastructure automation environments that engineers rely on: Terraform, OpenTofu, and Ansible, then providing the workflows to tie it all together, reducing tool sprawl and wasted time. We make it easy to create workflows that combine IaC for provisioning, Ansible for configuration management, and policies for governance, and we give developers access to Spacelift workflows directly from Kubernetes, with a Kubernetes Operator.

VMblog:  What's your elevator pitch for a CTO or CIO? How does your solution impact the bottom line?

Vlachos:  Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that manages the whole infrastructure life cycle - provisioning, configuration and governance. Spacelift integrates with existing infrastructure tooling like Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible to deliver a single, integrated workflow that provides secure, cost-effective and resilient infrastructure, fast. By automating deployment and configuration, providing developer self-service, golden paths with guardrails, and an OPA policy engine, Spacelift empowers businesses to accelerate developer velocity while maintaining control and governance over their infrastructure.

VMblog:  How does your technology integrate with the broader CNCF landscape? What role do you play in the modern cloud-native stack?

Vlachos:  We are deeply integrated with OpenTofu, and our engineers are primary upstream contributors to the project, including project governance leadership roles. Zooming out a bit, our solutions are part of the entire cloud native ecosystem.

VMblog:  What's your perspective on the intersection of DevSecOps and cloud-native in 2025? How do you help customers navigate this?

Vlachos:  The ability to manage secure, compliant environments while supporting developer velocity is at the heart of the cloud native promise. DevSecOps teams need confidence that infrastructure teams are maintaining deployments according to best practices and standards. We help companies navigate this often-conflicting tension with automation that uses the tools engineers already rely on, delivered in an integrated platform that helps teams consistently deploy safely and fast.

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