At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 in Salt Lake City, VMblog stopped by the Spacelift booth to talk with Jonah Kowall, SVP of Product and Design. Jonah explains how Spacelift helps companies deliver infrastructure faster through a GitOps workflow, and how the platform is expanding into new areas like Day 2 operations.

In this interview, Jonah covers:

• What sets Spacelift apart: Helping organizations deliver infrastructure faster in a GitOps workflow, with orchestration, guardrails and governance that let teams scale safely and securely to meet the demands of internal developers pushing to production.
• Spacelift Intelligence: Spacelift’s AI offering, available as a chat interface in the product and as a hosted MCP that lets you connect your AI of choice. In newer product flows, AI can be used to build, orchestrate and debug workflows, be embedded in a workflow, or even call a workflow.
• New announcement, run observability: Announced at OpenTofu Day, this gives trace-level visibility into why a run is taking longer than expected, such as why something that took 5 minutes last week now takes 20. Spacelift first built OpenTelemetry support into OpenTofu, then built a way to collect, store and visualize that data in its products.
• AI governance: Putting policies in place early so code checked in by developers, and by their agents, meets organizational policies and regulatory requirements, before agents are unleashed. For environments already out of control, Spacelift offers drift detection and is working on features to capture unmanaged resources.
• OpenTofu and the CNCF: Why OpenTofu, a CNCF project, continues to gain popularity among teams migrating from other orchestration tools like Terraform.

Getting started with Spacelift:
Spacelift offers a free trial as well as a free tier that can be used at no cost, indefinitely. You can also reach out to the team directly.
https://spacelift.io/

About the guest:
Jonah Kowall is SVP of Product and Design at Spacelift.

Back to: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026