- Companies can now launch lightweight, fast vclusters that are backed by a single Kubernetes cluster, which consolidates workloads
- Loft is used by platform teams in enterprises to create internal Kubernetes platforms for developing cloud-native software, executing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
Loft Labs, which makes Kubernetes easily accessible to developers, announced that vcluster, a first-of-its-kind virtual cluster technology for Kubernetes, is now freely available on GitHub. Companies can now launch lightweight, fast vclusters that are backed by a single Kubernetes cluster, which consolidates workloads, allows for resource sharing, and ultimately saves a lot of infrastructure cost.
Fabian Kramm, CTO of Loft Labs said, “vcluster is the first actually working virtualization technology for Kubernetes. There are other similar solutions being developed, however, vcluster is the only one that is already being used in production by a variety of companies. We have decided to open-source it because the demand for a standalone vcluster technology is huge and there needs to be an open-source and freely available solution.”
Eliminate idle workloads and save cloud computing costs
With Loft, any Kubernetes cluster becomes a self-service platform where engineers can create namespaces and virtual clusters whenever they need them. At the same time, Loft’s sleep mode and cluster sharing technologies help eliminate idle workloads and save cloud computing costs.
Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft said, “There is a large demand for Kubernetes virtualization. Apple noted that in their keynote at KubeCon Europe last year. Launching our vcluster technology under the permissive Apache-2.0 license will enable anyone to explore virtual clusters and even contribute to it. Currently, there are over 90 companies, including three Fortune 500 enterprises, that have started utilizing our vcluster technology.”
Loft is used by platform teams in enterprises to create internal Kubernetes platforms for developing cloud-native software, executing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, or running artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) experiments. It is also used in production use cases, where IT teams use Loft’s virtual clusters to surpass the scalability limits of regular Kubernetes clusters and where companies need to provision full-blown demo environments or securely-isolated instances of their managed software products.
