Vladimir Mikhalev

Vladimir Mikhalev (Valdemar) designs cloud and container platforms on Kubernetes, Terraform and AWS, secures their software supply chain, and explains the trade-offs to engineers, customers and leadership. He is a CNCF Ambassador, one of fewer than 250 Docker Captains worldwide, and an IBM Champion, with 10 vendor community titles in total, including AWS Community Builder and Snyk Ambassador (Snyk Ambassador Award finalist, 2023).

In production, he moved his company’s infrastructure from on-premises servers to AWS, Azure and containers, a migration Docker published as an enterprise customer story with 75% faster deployments and 40% fewer servers. He runs a production platform on Amazon EKS with Terraform and GitHub Actions, is the Kubernetes and cloud expert on customer calls, answers customer security questionnaires, and trains engineers on Docker, DevOps and GitOps practices.

His work ships where anyone can check it. His aws-kubectl image has passed 1.5 million Docker Hub pulls and is built with keyless Cosign signatures, SBOMs and SLSA provenance. He maintains 70+ open-source deployment blueprints on GitHub with AI coding agents working under policy gates he proves with planted violations, and writes about where AI reviews and agents fail in production. He has written eight articles for Docker’s official blog, covering Docker Model Runner for local AI workloads, Testcontainers, and Docker integrations with VS Code and Jenkins.

He is Technical Editor of “Docker and Kubernetes Security” (2025), a DevOps Dozen 2025 finalist for Best DevOps Book of the Year. He publishes runnable reference architectures at valdemar.ai, hosts The Verdict podcast on container security and AI governance, and has more than 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.