Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya, and welcome to TFiR Let’s Talk. Today we have with us, once again, Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs. Lukas, it’s great to have you back on the show, and happy New Year.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, happy New Year. Thanks for having me, Swap.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Today, we are going to talk about, of course vcluster we have covered it earlier and k0s. You folks have made your Open Source committees, virtual clusters available, or it can run on k0s. We will talk about that, but before we go there, even if we have covered vcluster, I just want to quickly refresh memories of our viewers also because 2022, that what is vcluster? What does it do?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, vcluster is a certified Kubernetes distribution and then is the only distribution that allows you to spin up clusters inside of clusters. So the goal of vcluster is really to have a large Kubernetes cluster in, EKS or GKE or any cloud provider, or even in your private cloud. And then split it up in these much smaller Kubernetes clusters that run on top of this larger cluster, and then be able to hand them out to engineering teams for testing, for development use cases or even for hosting, production workloads. It’s a very, very interesting project that we open sourced last year.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of adoption you have seen or interest that you’ve seen in the project?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, we’ve had a pretty crazy journey last year. So many feature requests. So many people that reached out to us, so many vendors looking into us as well to kind of integrate vcluster of course, we’re just getting started. It’s an early project, right? We’ve open sourced vcluster less than a year ago. At this point, we did the certification process. So we passed all the conformance tests right now to make vcluster as close to a real Kubernetes cluster as possible while still maintaining its lightweight nature. And it’s been, crazy, the attention that we’re getting in the community. I gave a talk at KubeCon for example, and I think like a third of attendees at the conference actually attended that talk was pretty crazy to see so many people showing up, for talk about a topic that is actually pretty deep about, how much for clusters work internally, but it’s fascinating the interest that we’re seeing.

Swapnil Bhartiya: There are a lot of Kubernetes distributions. Why did k0s attract you or the need came from the k0s community?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, Actually it was the user community pushing for that. We had at least 10 people, in a period of couple of weeks asking us, Hey, does this work of k0s we’re like, no, it doesn’t have to use K3s. So we knew we had to, kind of look into, can we make this work? And it was actually pretty straightforward to integrate it. I think Mirantis has done a great job at building k0s and, making it very, very close to the original Kubernetes as well, which was another thing that we definitely had on the agenda. And we shipped that I think two weeks ago. Yeah. So I think it was definitely mainly driven by the community.

Swapnil Bhartiya: K0 also kind of lightweight. If I’m not wrong, it’s also more optimized or, focused on edge use cases can be used in a lot of places, but what value is vcluster bringing to k0s community or what benefit, if you look at, in a backward that V cluster community sees from it. So let’s talk about win-win, positive sum game for both communities.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah. I think what we see a lot today is k0s use in development. I think Mirantis has done an incredibly great job if there are lens IDE, that is, I think, the most popular tool to investigate the Kubernetes cluster at this point and see what’s running inside of there. So obviously, they get a lot of share of the minds of developers in a way. So no wonder that k0s is pretty popular for developers. And I think what we are adding with vcluster is the option to not run these clusters. What a lot of people do is run them locally, right? What you can do now as an organization is you can essentially take an Amazon host at EKS cluster, right. Which is much easier to spin up, of course, because you can just click three buttons in AWS’s UI or run your typical Terraform script to stand it up.

And then the question is, how do you hand that out to engineers now? And what you can do now is you can create these k0s as clusters that run inside of their EKS cluster and then hand them out to developers. Effectively, you’re reducing the burden for developers to maintain their own puppet cluster on their laptop, which a lot of folks are doing today. And you can really unleash that cloud potential for them. So they have no option to use all the AWS services, connect to them from directly inside their k0s vcluster effectively. It’s pretty crazy because under the hood, it runs in AWS and that’s, I think, a really powerful part of what vcluster adds to k0s distribution.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You also mentioned K3s along with k0s, what other Kubernetes distributions are supported so that the vcluster experience goes across the ecosystem irrespective of what distro somebody’s running.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah. We started with K3s originally, because that was just the go-to distribution that we saw that supports lightweight Kubernetes. And then, we knew we had to support vanilla upstream Kubernetes. So that was kind of the next step on the agenda. And then while we were discussing that people were asking us for KC0 S so that one is working as well. And we honestly also have the next one in the making, because I was just, on the, AWS’s containers from the couch screen and, told them about, we’re starting to add more distributions. So the AWS team saw that and immediately started working on integrating EKS as well, which is really great to see that we’re probably soon going to support, I guess, EKS and EKS. Those kinds of use cases.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Of course there is vanilla Kubernetes. Ideally, I don’t know the reality, but ideally to be like, Hey though, it doesn’t matter which Kubernetes distribution is the support should not be difficult because all Kubernetes, but the reality is different. So can you also talk about the kind of challenges that are there for communities who do want to support whatever Kubernetes distributions are out there? I do hope the situation will not be like Linux distributions between thousands of them, but we are closer. So if you can talk about the challenges out there and, just because this was the latest case, how different was integration with case zeros versus other distributions?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah. I think the way that we package those distributions and BCOS makes it very easy for us to integrate them. And we pretty much expose all the configuration options to the user directly. So obviously, we make sure that when they use our k0s or three S, or, whatever distribution that we ship out of the box, that version and whatever we configure that works. But the great thing is actually we’re exposing everything. So if you need to change something and pass kind of like options to the API server and start it in a different way, have a specific configuration, you’re running things that we may have not tested, like you’re running k0s in an air gap cluster on OpenShift for someone, it’s like, you can mix and much, however you want, then you have the option to, make custom modifications as well.

But in general, the procedure is pretty straightforward because the only thing that we need to look at is how these distributions are spun as a control plane, spun out what images are required. And then we need to bundle that into a chart effectively because that’s the way that we spin up these virtual clusters.

And then we need to attach our syncer to that control plane and disable the scheduler that natively would run inside of the control plane. So the sinker replaces the scheduler. That’s pretty much the procedure and the procedure is pretty much the same for every Istio. Of course, they’re like minor differences and always a little couple of things to figure out right. To make it work. But yeah, that’s roughly how it Works,

Swapnil Bhartiya: But when it comes to integrating with XYZ distribution, how much work the user or customer had to do. And if they are looking for, they get stuck somewhere, should they go to [inaudible 00:09:12] communities or should they go to Loft community?

Lukas Gentele: It depends a little bit. If they’re seeing issues with spinning up k0s control plane directly, it may be worth reaching out to them. For example, we had an issue recently with K3s and the latest versions that they shipped. It’s always great to, they can always approach us, right. We are super responsive and try to point people in the right direction, but we pretty much immediately saw, Hey, this is an issue of their latest K3s version. And there’s an open issue in their repository. There’s not much we can do until this is resolved. Right. And I think there’s also great power and kind of having different Istio supported, because if something like this happens, you may as well just switch to k0s if, that doesn’t matter for you and in this case, or they may be faster at shipping a new, like upstream [inaudible 00:10:05] ships, a new version has a new feature.

Then the question is, how long does it take for that new version to be released as K3s or is k0s, right? And you may go with the one that has the faster release cycle or the one that adds, additional testing and security around it. It’s up to the user in the end, which Istio they want to follow. I think right now we have a crazy amount of like 60 Istio that you can think from its pretty insane. And that’s only like the certified ones. I don’t know that maybe others that are even not [inaudible 00:10:37] distributions, but there’s definitely a lot of choice right now. We kind of want to reflect that choice in vcluster. Although, I assume it’s fair to say that there will be some kind of consolidation happening as well. I think, I think there already has been some consolidation happening at this point.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So vcluster is an open source project. And you said there are so many Kubernetes distributions out there. If there is a user community or user who do want support for X Kubernete distribution. So just the way we see in a lot of other open source committees, a lot of folks can go in, do it themselves, or all this has to come from Loft Labs itself. Or when you talk about vcluster, you’re talking about a community, not the company.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, Absolutely. So we see vcluster as an independent open source project. Of course, we’re steering it at this point as a company, we’re putting a lot of resources in as well, but we’re open to any kind of contributions. Again, like the AWS team saw EKS is not supportive. They opened the pre request and now we’re really actively helping them get that into vcluster the same for any kind of other features. We have a lot of folks who are interested in making network policies work, right? And then we are here to kind of help them guide, contribute these features in, in vcluster. And even if it’s just an idea, you may raise the idea and we decide, we’ll spend some time on this and build it.

It’s really a community effort in terms of like, what is needed, what features are out there, right? And then who builds these features? I mean, ultimately vcluster should be successful as an open source project, no matter how we’re doing as a company, even if we disappear any year from now, I’m pretty sure other people will pick up those efforts around vcluster because it’s such a valuable product. And so many people are building on top of this distribution right now that are, I’m pretty sure vcluster is going to be a pretty huge success story, no matter how a company is doing.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And no, thanks for bringing that up because this is also really important for sustainability of open source projects. So they’re now tied to the company, but since you brought the company in, so I will talk about the companies, you do have to make profit, to have to remain sustainable and grow. So how is Loft labs benefiting from the adoption for this growth of weakness? I’m not talking purely from selfish, but also I’m talking about healthy, commercial support is very important for sustainability of open source without all these, companies open source will not exist. So, so that’s why I want to also understand how its tied to the success of Loft labs. If you can talk about that.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah. I think our commercial success really stems from the popularity of our open source projects because that’s how people find us. That’s why a lot of people trust us as well, right? Because, The software that we’re producing is in a way, a platform for platform engineers, you’re using it internally in your organization to give literally like a thousand plus engineers access to your AWS clusters, right? You must really trust that software, right? Because it touches a lot of, daily routines and workflows of all of these engineers.

It becomes a really critical part of the organization. And when you’re seeing the work that we’re doing in open source space, I think that creates a lot of trust and it creates a lot of interest in what we’re doing. vcluster is a good example because vcluster was actually part of our commercial offering first cause we saw the needs of our customers, to isolate workloads and to give users more capabilities than with just a namespace and then the cluster was born, but it was not an open source project at the time we shipped it first inside the commercial product.

And then after a few months we saw, how well it was received, on the customer side and the end users within the companies that we work with, that we made the decision to open source it. And I think that created in turn a lot of visibility for, what we’re doing in the space, what we’re trying to achieve and for us as a company. So I think it’s, it’s super beneficial to, contribute to open source for, a company that has a commercial product in our space.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Lukas, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about, of course vcluster, and actually we talked about a larger, problem, not problem them, but no, to support the, as many distributions and communities out there. So once I can thank for those insight and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank You.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.