Loft Labs integrates with Argo CD to automate deployments with virtual clusters

Loft Labs has integrated with the open source tool Argo CD (continuous delivery) to automate the deployment of services to virtual Kubernetes clusters.

Now, virtual clusters created in Loft are automatically recognized in Argo CD including user permissions and access control settings, so that Argo CD users can deploy to the virtual cluster without any additional effort.

This combination allows companies to set up a self-service platform for engineering teams to provision virtual clusters on demand and have them automatically become part of the engineers’ CD pipelines.

“With this Loft integration for Argo CD, virtual clusters can now fit into GitOps-based continuous delivery pipelines within minutes,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs.

“This minimizes manual effort for engineering teams, so that in one click, Argo CD can be used with virtual clusters, eliminating any setup effort and reducing time to ship new features with Argo and Loft.”, Gentele added.

Loft Labs builds its Kubernetes platform on top of its open source vcluster project. Within the past year, 17 million virtual clusters have been created using vcluster and the technology has been adopted by Adobe, Codefresh, SpectroCloud, Weaveworks, and others.

Loft’s vcluster technology is used to create lightweight Kubernetes clusters that run inside the namespaces of other Kubernetes clusters such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

A virtual cluster behaves just like any regular Kubernetes cluster because vcluster is a certified Kubernetes distribution, which means that it passes all conformance tests that CNCF requires. Loft can be used to provision virtual clusters on-demand whenever needed, either using the Loft UI (user interface), the Loft CLI (command-line interface) or even using the Kubernetes command-line tool kubectl via the custom resources provided as part of Loft.

Virtual clusters are often used as development environments when engineers are building, testing and debugging cloud-native software, but they are also used as ephemeral environments for executing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

Using virtual clusters reduces cluster sprawl, allows for more secure and better maintainable multi-tenancy, and aims for more efficient resource sharing, which ultimately saves a lot of infrastructure cost.

Argo CD is an open-source CD tool that follows Git-based workflows to automate the deployment of services within Kubernetes. The tool is being adopted widely in the industry with a 115% production usage increase in the last year, that includes companies such as Adobe, BlackRock, Intuit, and many other Fortune 500 companies.