Speed and Control in DevOps

Mastering speed and control in DevOps - Pawel Hytry | PlatformCon 2025

This presentation explores the fundamental challenge in DevOps: balancing speed and control in infrastructure delivery. Using Formula 1 racing as an analogy, it presents findings from Spacelift’s 2025 research on infrastructure automation maturity.

The Speed vs Control Paradox

The core tension in modern DevOps is between moving fast and maintaining control. The presentation draws parallels between F1 racing evolution and DevOps maturity. In the 1950s, F1 cars could reach 180 mph but averaged only 64.6 mph due to lack of controls, telemetry, and safety measures - similar to early DevOps setups with “fast pipelines, cool tools, but brittle processes”. By the 1970s-80s, F1 introduced structure and controls that actually made racing faster, more consistent, and safer.

Research Findings

The study surveyed over 400 infrastructure decision makers across various industries, with nearly half from software and SaaS companies. Key findings reveal significant inefficiencies:

• More than 50% of companies take over a week to push infrastructure changes to production
• 43% need to rerun deployments at least four times
• 45% of teams think they excel at infrastructure automation, but only 14% actually do based on measurable outcomes

Maturity Framework

The research identifies four maturity levels:

• Experimenters: Just getting started with basic tools like Terraform
• Adopters: Moving forward but struggling with consistency and governance
• Optimizers: Have structure and efficiency but lack scalability or compliance coverage
• Leaders: Built automation into every layer with security, delivery, and scale

What Leaders Do Differently

High-maturity teams that successfully balance speed and control demonstrate several key characteristics:

• Comprehensive automation: They automate across the full lifecycle from provisioning to day-2 operations, not just CI/CD
• Platform engineering: They operationalize platform engineering by centralizing infrastructure ownership and enabling developer self-service
• Security integration: Leaders are six times more likely to automate security scanning and embed checks into pipelines from day one
• Performance gains: They’re twice as likely to get deployments right on first try, three times more likely to provision infrastructure in under four hours, and five times more likely to ship to production daily

Key Success Factors

Leaders implement developer self-service, integrate security and compliance early, invest in platform teams, optimize for cost, and avoid siloed automation by managing day-1 and day-2 operations centrally. This holistic approach enables teams to move quickly within trusted automated guardrails, proving that speed and control don’t have to be a trade-off when implemented through proper design and investment in the right platforms and processes.