Guest: Lukas Gentele (LinkedIn)
Company: Loft Labs (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Loft Labs’ open-source project vCluster is the industry standard for virtual Kubernetes clusters. The company has launched the commercial version vCluster.Pro to meet growing demand to run vCluster at a much larger scale with enterprise-grade security and performance.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele shares the features of this new edition and how it enables companies to build more compute-intensive products and services.

Backstory:

• vCluster.Pro was born from Loft Labs’s interactions with very fast-scaling startups and very large enterprises.
• One company in particular, CoreWeave, became a design partner. It’s a cloud provider that is focused on shipping the next wave of NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads. A lot of these AI companies need a lot of Kubernetes power.
• CoreWeave was looking to partner with a company that can help them scale Kubernetes beyond the limits of what you can do with physical clusters. Using vCluster.Pro was a perfect solution.

What’s new with vCluster.Pro:

• Most people that Loft Labs engage with today are using 100+ virtual clusters. The focus is on the management and the security controls around so many virtual clusters as well as the resource consumption and performance of these virtual clusters.
• CoreDNS plugin is bundled into vCluster.Pro, which gives admins the capability to open the virtual cluster up to reach other services that run in the underlying host cluster or even in another virtual cluster. It is shipped directly with vCluster in a security hardened container image. Since there is only one pod, it is more efficient, the standup is quicker and fewer pieces to manage.
• Any patch release or feature releases coming out will be joined with the vCluster rather than as a separate DNS solution for each customer.
• You can launch a management UI and you have a management CLI that allows your engineers to access the vClusters via the SSL.
• There is audit logging for any interaction that they do inside their virtual clusters.
• It allows you to run the vCluster pod, the control plane of the vCluster, in one Kubernetes cluster, and then the tenant workloads in another Kubernetes cluster. This means nobody can touch the control plane and launch any other workloads in this cluster, making it more stable and more secure.

On competing with AWS and Google:

• Loft Labs’ vCluster is a complementary solution, not a replacement. You cannot run a vCluster without a real cluster. You need to have an EKS or GKE cluster, and then you can launch 5, 10 or 100 vClusters on top of it. You will still need the nodes, the VMs that power that cluster, so there’s no way to do this without a cloud provider. In fact, Loft Labs is driving more people towards the cloud and towards spinning up more Kubernetes workloads, because these clusters are more cost effective and easier to scale and manage.

What’s in the works:

• Loft Labs launched the DevPod project early this year. Even though it is in the early stages, it was trending on Hacker News because 60,000 people started using it on day one.
• For KubeCon, they are heavily focusing on the vCluster, which still has so much untapped potential for new use cases. They recently discovered that people were using it for internal workshops and elearning.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.