Loft Labs launches vcluster, a working virtualization technology for Kubernetes
Loft Labs announced that vcluster, a virtual cluster technology for Kubernetes, is now freely available on GitHub.
Rather than creating heavyweight, resource-hungry, isolated clusters over and over again, 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.
“vcluster is the first actually working virtualization technology for Kubernetes,” said Fabian Kramm, CTO of Loft Labs.
“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.”
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.
“There is a large demand for Kubernetes virtualization. Apple noted that in their keynote at KubeCon Europe last year,” said Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft.
“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.”
“Virtual clusters for Kubernetes is a game changer that is the equivalent of virtual machine technology in the 1990s that swept in the era of cloud computing,” said Abby Kearns, CTO at Puppet Labs.
“The team at Loft Labs has created a well-architected technology and I see the potential of vclusters to improve developer experience with Kubernetes, something that I have been passionate about for years in my previous role as CEO at Cloud Foundry Foundation.”
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 valuable 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.