Raffaele Spazzoli
Raffaele Spazzoli is a full-stack enterprise architect with 20+ years of experience. Raffaele started his career in Italy as a Java Architect, then gradually moved to Integration Architect and then Enterprise Architect. Later he moved to the United States to eventually become an OpenShift Architect for Red Hat consulting services, acquiring in the process, knowledge of the infrastructure side of IT. Currently Raffaele covers a consulting position of cross-portfolio Red Hat products with a focus on OpenShift. For most of his career Raffaele has worked with large financial institutions allowing him to acquire an understanding of the processes, security and compliance requirements of large enterprise customers.
Around 2019 Raffaele became part of the CNCF TAG Storage and contributed to the Cloud Native Disaster Recovery whitepaper. Later he took the co-chair role for TAG Storage. Two major focus points for Raffaele are how to improve the developer experience by implementing internal development platforms (IDP) and more recently how to help organization run Virtual Machines in Kubernetes.
Senior Principal Architect
red hat
Session
Migrating hundreds of virtual machines from vSphere to OpenShift Virtualization is
not just a lift-and-shift exercise -- it demands repeatable, auditable, multi-cluster
infrastructure that can be stood up and torn down with confidence. In this talk, we
present a reference implementation of a GitOps-driven "migration factory" that
provisions bare-metal OpenShift clusters, installs 25+ day-2 operators, and
orchestrates VM migrations -- all from a single Git repository.
We will walk through how a hub-and-spoke architecture is fully declared in Git and
reconciled by ArgoCD using an app-of-apps pattern with sync waves to enforce
ordering across operators, instances, and configurations. You will see how Advanced
Cluster Management (ACM) provisions spoke clusters via Assisted Installer, how an
ACM policy bootstraps GitOps on each new spoke, and how a custom ArgoCD
management plugin (CMP) performs environment-variable substitution so that a
single set of reusable Kustomize components can target any cluster.
Through a live demo, we will stand up the full stack -- from an empty hypervisor to a
running hub with two spoke clusters ready to accept migrated VMs -- and show the
end-to-end automation pipeline that ties it all together. We will also share the hard
lessons learned around sync-wave ordering, secret management across cluster
boundaries, bare-metal networking with MetalLB and NMState, and keeping
drift-free state across multiple ArgoCD instances.
Attendees will walk away with a concrete, open-source blueprint they can fork and
adapt to their own virtualization migration efforts, along with patterns for scaling
GitOps beyond a single cluster.