DevConf.US 2026

Vikas Mulaje

Vikas Mulaje is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat based in Pune, India, with over eight years of experience specializing in cloud-native technologies and Linux systems. he has built a robust technical profile centered on the OpenShift-vrtualization and Kubernetes ecosystems, utilizing languages like Python and Go to develop automation and infrastructure solutions. His expertise spans DevOps tools such as Gitops, Ansible, Docker, and Jenkins, and he is a recognized contributor within the open-source community, maintaining an active presence on platforms like GitHub and Quora to share knowledge on system administration and software engineering.


Job title:

Principal Software Engineer

Company or affiliation:

Red hat


Session

09-24
10:00
35min
GitOps at Scale: Building a Virtualization Migration Factory on OpenShift
Vikas Mulaje, Raffaele Spazzoli

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.

DevOps and Automation
101 (Capacity 48)