At the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah, Loft Labs announced the public beta of vCluster Cloud, aiming to simplify vCluster management by hosting the platform for users.

In this episode, Lukas Gentele, CEO and Co-founder at Loft Labs, joins us to discuss the rapid growth of the company, the launch of vCluster Cloud, the integration of vCluster with KubeVirt for VM provisioning, and enhancements like using external databases such as Amazon Relational Database System (RDS) to improve scalability and resilience. Gentele also highlights the traction of DevPod, currently in private beta, and its potential to support developer workflows.

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

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls. 

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Loft Labs’ role and vision in the Kubernetes ecosystem

• Gentele introduces Loft Labs, explaining its mission to empower platform engineers deploying Kubernetes at scale by offering open-source solutions. Gentele highlights their commitment to building a strong community around Kubernetes.
• Gentele describes Loft Labs’ focus on simplifying Kubernetes management for developers, emphasizing how their tools help teams optimize workflows and scale efficiently in complex cloud-native environments.
• At KubeCon, Gentele notes the significance of connecting directly with users, valuing in-person interactions to understand pain points and collaborating on solutions tailored for practitioners.
• Loft Labs’ is dedicated to solving real-world challenges for platform engineers, with an emphasis on streamlining Kubernetes deployment and improving operational efficiency.

Loft Labs’ growth and evolution in the industry

• Reflecting on Loft Labs’ journey, Gentele shares the company’s growth from attending their first post-pandemic KubeCon to celebrating a team milestone of 50 employees. Gentele emphasizes how their growth aligns with the expansion of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Gentele highlights the challenges and opportunities of being a remote-first company, underscoring how events like KubeCon strengthen team cohesion through rare in-person meetings and shared experiences.
• Discussing the pandemic’s impact, Gentele observes how it accelerated Kubernetes adoption and increased demand for tools like those from Loft Labs, helping teams scale their cloud-native operations.
• Gentele explains the team’s rapid expansion over the past year, attributing their success to a clear focus on supporting platform engineers and driving innovation within the Kubernetes community.

Launch of vCluster Cloud and its user benefits

• Gentele announces the beta launch of vCluster Cloud, designed to make exploring and adopting vCluster features more accessible for users. This cloud-based service simplifies onboarding and experimentation.
• Key benefits include streamlined setup, faster access to new features, and enhanced usability for teams managing Kubernetes virtual clusters at scale. Gentele emphasizes how these improvements boost productivity and reduce friction.
• Gentele contrasts vCluster Cloud with traditional offerings, detailing the different tiers and platform features. Gentele explains how these tiers address different user needs, from small teams to large-scale enterprise deployments.
• Gentele discusses the importance of managing large fleets of virtual clusters efficiently, enabling users to scale operations without compromising control.

Kubernetes evolution and integration with KubeVirt

• Gentele introduces the integration of vCluster with KubeVirt, allowing users to spin up virtual machines within virtual clusters. This evolution expands Kubernetes’ applicability beyond containerized workloads.
• Drawing parallels with Linux, Gentele agrees with the comparison of Kubernetes’ trajectory, noting its growing use cases in areas like stateful workloads and ephemeral environments for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Ephemeral environments are critical for modern Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)  pipelines, and vCluster’s adaptability supports these transient workloads effectively, enabling rapid iteration and testing.

Supporting platform engineers and future innovations

• Gentele describes Loft Labs’ mission to provide building blocks for platform engineers, helping them design resilient, optimized platforms while balancing standardization with team autonomy.
• Discussing future projects, Gentele shares updates on DevPod, which is in private beta and seeing strong adoption. Gentele hints at further advancements in this area to support developers more effectively.
• Gentele teases upcoming announcements for vCluster and other initiatives, reinforcing Loft Labs’ commitment to continuous innovation and addressing emerging challenges in the Kubernetes landscape.
• Gentele reiterates the company’s focus on equipping platform teams with tools that simplify Kubernetes operations and enhance productivity in dynamic, cloud-native environments.

Enhancements in vCluster and database integration

• Gentele elaborates on recent enhancements to vCluster, such as the ability to store state in external databases like SQL and Postgres. These upgrades improve resilience and scalability for Kubernetes workloads.
• New features include seamless integration with services like Amazon Relational Database System (RDS), enabling secure and efficient provisioning of databases for virtual clusters. Gentele explains how these capabilities strengthen enterprise deployments.
• Gentele emphasizes the strategic value of these enhancements, as they provide users with reliable tools to manage complex workloads and maintain stability across Kubernetes environments.

Unedited Transcript (Note: the text is AI generated, it has not been edited or reviewed. It may contain errors, including incorrect names. It’s provided here under  Creative Commons license (CC by 4.0) to be used by bloggers, journalists and analysts for creating their own content.)

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi. This is Swapnil Bhartiya, and we are here at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah. And today we have with us, once again, Lukas Gently, CEO and co founder of loft labs. Lukas, good to have you back on the show.

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, good to be here. Live with you.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. And of course, there are a lot of announcement that you folks made, so we are going to talk about the big ones and the small ones. But before we go there, just quickly remind our viewers what is loft lab all about. And because you folks, you know, you in the booth, a lot of traffic is there, which means that you are doing something right. So we also wanted to say, what are you doing? Right?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, I think part of it is building a open source kind of motion, open source community, right, getting that excitement around what we’re doing on the on the technology level, and I think that’s one of the things I really love about KubeCon, right? This is not a, you know, buyers conference, right? Or strictly, kind of, like, business oriented. There’s just a ton of practitioners here, and people that have hands on experience with our technologies like V cluster, right? They come up to us and say, like, Hey, I’ve been already doing this. I put you in here, and now I’m exploring this new thing, and I kind of want to get your take on it right. And that’s the kind of conversations I love having here. And I think, I think we’re good at having them. I think, you know, our booth is, there’s obviously sales people there too. And, you know, and marketers go to market folks, but we also just have, like, you know, engineering focused folks in there. And, like, I’m having a lot of these conversations as well, and that’s always just great.

Swapnil Bhartiya: If I ask you to extract the meaning of loft lab, the value, what is loft lab?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, I think we’re really targeted towards the platform engineers, folks that want to hand out Kubernetes at scale within an organization in a self service fashion, ideally, and we help them set the guard rails in place and find the golden paths for people make sure when they hand out hundreds or even 1000s of Kubernetes clusters that I do in An efficient way. And I think it’s these kind of optimizations that we’re working on. Obviously, at the core of all of it is V cluster for our virtual Kubernetes technology.

Swapnil Bhartiya : We are here at KubeCon, and you have been at couple of kubecons. Your boot sizes also keeps growing. The company is also growing. So could we talk about the growth of company with the growth of evolution of ecosystem, yeah,

Lukas Gentele: it’s exciting to see. I mean, you know, the first KubeCon I was at was pre COVID, right? And then COVID hit, obviously. And KubeCon was very heavily downsized, right? I remember giving the first talk, the first talk ever about V cluster at a KubeCon was in LA in 2021, you know, things had just opened up after the pandemic. International travel was not permitted yet, and that conference was tiny. There was like maybe two and a half 1000 people. There probably like 80% where cloud native vendors like us. Obviously, the talk was streamed, so a whole bunch of folks have seen it, but, yeah, I think we’ve seen like KubeCon revitalized from there, right? Valencia was was great. Paris earlier this year was amazing, right? Chicago last year, quite a bit bigger than Detroit the year before, and definitely much bigger than LA and you know, we started in 2021 with open sourcing V cluster in early 21 and I think the same time as KubeCon, you know, was reset and like resurfaced, and like grew pretty exponentially, we’ve grown pretty similarly. Yeah, we actually just celebrated 50 employees, so that was a big milestone for us that we just hit this week. Yeah, very exciting to see the team grow. I think we grew like about 2x or so in the past, like nine to 10 months of this year. And yeah, it’s fantastic. The team comes together. And obviously we’re a remote first company, so KubeCon is always a great excuse for us to really meet in person, not just through our users, but also within our team. So KubeCon is here. You have team meetings in person. Yeah, that’s, you know, everybody loves it, right? It’s like, that’s, that’s home for everybody in a way, right? And you walk across here and you meet so many people that you’ve, you’ve got to know over the years, right? There’s like, this, you know, annual or biannual tradition of like, hey, you know, let’s just catch up at KubeCon. And, yeah, it’s a great opportunity for us every time.

Swapnil Bhartiya: I also met Peter. So what kind of announcement you folks made here?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, I think the big one is the launch of V cluster cloud. It’s in beta right now. We’re working towards making it much more of a mission critical, stable solution. But right now it’s a great way to, you know, we have V cluster and then obviously the Pro features on top of the core technology. But then we also have these platform features, and that requires that you install the V cluster platform, which you know is a component that you obviously running your V clusters is something that most companies want to do. So running the platform is a different story, though, right? And that’s a little bit of a hurdle to get started with, potentially, right? You spun up a couple of V clusters. Now you’re seeing these platform features like our sleep mode that puts virtual clusters to sleep automatically. You’re like, Hey, let me try this out. And then we ask you, Hey, to install the platform, and you got to have an ingress to expose it, right? It has a UI component to it. You may need to open up a firewall, right? And we just take away that burden by hosting our platform for you. So you have a couple of V clusters running, and you want to upgrade them to Pro V clusters. You want to see what the platform can do. You can just go to V cluster cloud, create an account, spin it up, and like, you know, takes like, maybe 30 seconds, right? And then you’re in, you connect your three or 4v clusters, and you’re ready to go. So for that initial exploration and experimentation with the product, this is going to make it so much faster for new users to discover things, but also for existing users. You know, we ship so many updates, so many new features. When, when people are in a certain version, they’re like, Oh, can I hold off on this upgrade for like, couple weeks? Or do I need this immediately? Let me check out the new version. Right? The cluster cloud is a great way to do this now.

Swapnil Bhartiya: So when we look at big cluster, because the Pro and weak as a cloud, so is it like, you know, evolution? Is it like, where you’re running? So I just want to understand the differences, similarities and how they complement each other.

Lukas Gentele : So we see the core features, right? The core is really what’s open source, right? That’s what you find on GitHub. That’s all the core functionality to spin up a virtual cluster, and then we have these Pro features. So, you know, for example, backing stores that are more resilient, the more high performance, networking, you know, a lot of features around, like peace of mind and stability, that’s what we call Pro features, that essentially makes your V cluster better. And then we have the platform features. The platform features are things that you need when you have a fleet of virtual clusters and you want to orchestrate that fleet right? You want to optimize things across a lot of virtual clusters. You know, if you have three virtual clusters running, it’s not important to turn them off automatically. But when you have like, 100 or 200 or 1000 virtual clusters running, you kind of want to automatically turn the ones off that are not currently used, and that’s what our platform does with the sleep mode, for example. So it’s a pretty natural evolution that you find V cluster core. You start exploring these core features, you excited. You come across a Pro feature in the doc, in the documentation, you want to upgrade, and then a couple months later, you may have 50 virtual clusters running, and then you’re thinking about these optimizations and more of the fleet management aspect, and that’s where really the platform comes in. And ultimately, because the cloud is the hosted version, right, the SaaS variant of VC cluster platform.

Swapnil Bhartiya: is vCluster cloud are targeting a specific cloud out there, public cloud, we can talk about, we can talk about private cloud.

Lukas Gentele: work, yeah. So you connect your own V clusters wherever they run, right? So you can even run them in Docker, desktop on your local machine, right? No Cloud account required for it. But obviously you can also run that in, you know, on an open shift cluster on Eks or something like that, right? We’re pretty flexible. As long as you spin up a V cluster, you can connect it to the to the cloud.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. Thank you. Now, any other announcement that you folks made here at the show?

Lukas Gentele: Yeah, there’s another announcement we recently made, and that’s a kubeford integration. So kubeford seems to get a lot of traction, you know, for the pretty obvious reasons with the whole, you know, VMware, kind of like, you know, drama. And I think it’s, it’s really interesting to see that interest in this project that allows you to spin up VMs through Kubernetes APIs, right? Obviously, Kubernetes APIs is what we do all day long. That V cluster ultimately delivers Kubernetes APIs to, you know, hundreds and 1000s of people in in these, in these fortune 500 companies. So it’s pretty natural that people are looking for ways to integrate VM provisioning into that flow. So we built this Kubernetes integration, which ultimately allows you to have a V cluster and then spin up virtual machines inside of that V cluster to also consume them. It’s really, really exciting and a very, very smooth experience for folks that want to have these legacy type workloads or just need the VM because they need deeper access, you know, to to the machine right for privileged containers or image building, or whatever they’re doing in those VMs.

Swapnil Bhartiya: When you look at Kubernetes from the early days, it was stateless workloads, then stateful workloads, then even folks are running on edge. You know, so is the same story that we saw the Linux kernel Linux created, I talked to him again, like at the Open Source summit recently. The reason he created by. The way it’s been used is beyond. How have you seen the evolution of Kubernetes itself from the original idea to where it is being used, and how loft is kind of addressing all those use cases?

Lukas Gentele : Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. I think Kubernetes, you know, is so much more than just containers. And I think people are realizing that now, right? There’s obviously great projects like cross plane, for example, right, that use Kubernetes API to provision cloud resources, right? And we’re kind of seeing Kubernetes and cods and the controller pattern, right, emerge as this thing that is much, much broader even than container workloads. And you know, we’re seeing people now use V cluster for clustering, for example, which is something, you know, we couldn’t even imagine when we got started, right? So it’s pretty crazy. Where people put you I think the one of the use cases I’m I’m particularly excited about as well, is, you know, the whole CI environment use case, ephemeral environments in CI, preview environments in CI and you know, if you were to think about spinning an entire Kubernetes cluster, like Eks cluster, up for every CI run, it’s gonna take like 3040, minutes to spin that up, right? So that’s not even possible with traditional Kubernetes versus with V cluster, it suddenly becomes possible, right? So I think I see part of what we’re doing as an extension of what you just described, right? Kubernetes becomes broader and broader, and with V cluster, it can become even broader than it is today. And, yeah, it’s, it’s really exciting. It’s like, you say, you know, it’s like Linux, it’s like ubiquitous. And, you know, I sometimes refer to, you know, the multi tenancy story as well. When? When people say, you know, when, if, sometimes here V cluster, initially, they’re like, doesn’t Kubernetes have R back and users and name spaces? Like, isn’t it possible to share Kubernetes cluster? And I’m like, well, Linux has users and permissions and folders, right? But, like, if you tried sharing a Linux server without VMs, right, it’s really hard, right? And I think that’s why easy to and like, you know, obviously all the cloud providers that are effectively selling you VMs, right? Rather than physical machines, is so attractive because that’s a clean way to share, you know, infrastructure without, you know, having to share it within Linux directly, right? So the virtualization layer is pretty important, and I think that’s the that’s really our contribution to, to Kubernetes itself.

Swapnil Bhartiya:  I’ll go back to, we cluster, you know, but you have a lot of other open source projects, and then you have commercial version. Can you talk about those? And how those do they? All of them, fit into the vision that you have in loft. And if I can also you did touch upon the very beginning the vision? How do those product or projects fit into that vision?

Lukas Gentele  : For us, it’s really supporting these platform engineers, right? Whether that’s a production platform or you’re building a, internal developer platform, right? Whatever you’re currently working on as a platform engineer, we want to be delivering these building blocks that get you to build your platform faster, to make your platform more resilient, more optimized, right? Because when you think about a lot of these platform teams, they have so much responsibility, right? They need to balance on the one hand side, you know, standardization, but on the other side they need to, you know, also give people autonomy, and they need to make sure that people, you know, can can move fast in these organizations, and that they’re not slowed down by the platform, right? So it’s a lot of like, really, you know, difficult and sometimes even conflicting things that they need to balance. And, you know, we hope to deliver these building blocks, like V cluster or like dev pod, that, you know, platform teams can build on top of. And we know, you know, we’re not gonna promise you the platform itself. I strongly believe that a lot of companies are different, and there’s such a big ecosystem of tools and processes, right, and languages and IDEs, right, that there can’t be like one platform for everyone, right? So every company, in a way, has to define what is the platform for them, and we can be a, you know, a couple of building blocks on the road to that platform that really gets you to that edge of, you know, performance and developer experience, right? So that’s the that’s the contribution we want to drive and choose

Swapnil Bhartiya:. You mentioned dev pod as well. Talk about what kind of journey you are planning for dev pod as well.

Lukas Gentele:Yeah, Dev pod is a very exciting project. We launched it, you know, last year. It’s, you know, not, I think it’s not even a year and a half old at this point. It just kind of blew up. We put it on Hacker News, right? People got very excited. And, yeah, we didn’t expect the reaction to be, you know, so cool. It was even quicker than V cluster, to be honest. And I think it’s fascinating to see it grow. We’re now in private beta for, you know, the commercial offering. We have a couple of early customers on the platform. It’s, it’s very exciting to to see it. Yeah, I can’t wait to open it up more to the world, but that’s a topic for next year.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Every year, you keep coming up with a new project and product. Just tease your audience, your customer, what else to expect from loft?,

Lukas Gentele : Yeah  there’s a whole bunch of things coming out on on the V cluster side, on the DevOps side as well. I think for for V cluster in particular, we’re seeing V cluster just become more ubiquitous than ever. One of the things that we realized is, you know, managing a virtual cluster needs to be as easy as possible, right? You got to have that peace of mind that you can just spin up a V cluster and it is running, it is resilient, right? And then you’re going to start putting it in more and more places. So one of the things that I’m particularly very excited about is putting the state of a virtual cluster into an external database. Because right now, you know when you when you spin up a V cluster, it’s using SQL lite by default, and then it can use etcd, whether it’s embedded etcd or an externally running etcd cluster. But you know, SQL Lite is an embedded database, so there’s, there’s definitely some limits as a single file database, right? So you can scale that up very, very much, right? Etcd obviously much more scalable, but also have a lot more work, right? So it’s really nice to say, Hey, I put my data into my SQL or Postgres database, because we’ve done that for years and years and years, right? Companies have very resilient ways to run SQL database at scale, back it up, snapshot it roll it back, right? Do schema migrations, right? There’s so many things. So if you’re putting this into like an RDS in AWS, you can have a globally distributed, completely high available, backed up, right? And all other things can go wrong with that. And having that as the back end for VCOs, that’s really exciting. That’s something we shipped earlier this year, and we now actually just with this release, yesterday, we announced that you can now also connect your RDS server to the platform, and it will provision databases for each V cluster you spin up with limited credential. It’s very secure. It cleans up the databases if you would like it to do that, and for us, we really just want to take out the friction of running a virtual cluster for mission critical workloads. So we’re investing a lot in that area right now.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Lukas monsign, thank you so much for joining me today, and as well, I look forward to chatting with you again.

Lukas Gentele: Thank you awesome. Good to see you here at KubeCon again.

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