One company that is bolstering Kubernetes virtualization is Loft Labs with their open-source project, vCluster. More than 40 million virtual clusters have been created using vCluster since the project was open sourced in 2021, but one of the most requested integrations since its inception has been with Rancher. In this video recorded at KubeCon in Paris, Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele  talks about their latest announcement. On discussing the latest integration, he says, “You can essentially spin up the clusters directly in Rancher and that’s really exciting, because a lot of our Rancher users have been asking for this integration for over two years.”

Loft Labs integration with Rancher to manage virtual clusters

• Loft Labs announced an integration with Rancher at KubeCon, which enables you to spin up the clusters directly in Rancher.
• Gentele tells us that this integration has been requested by users for over two years so that they can manage virtual clusters with Rancher.
• He discusses Loft Labs’ goal to partner with companies to enable users to spin up more virtual clusters. He talks about their business model, what vCluster.Pro offers, and how the integration for Rancher will help tap into that community too.

Customer base and industries Loft Labs serve, and the roadmap for vCluster.Pro

• Gentele discusses the other integrations they have built such as with Terraform and K3s. He tells us that they are considering more integrations in the future.
• Loft Labs’ customer base includes large Fortune 500-type companies and cloud providers. Gentele shares some of their key customers and use cases.
• Gentele highlights some of the industries they serve such as financial, energy, and insurance.
• Gentele discusses the roadmap for vCluster.Pro, which is focused on improving operations for monitoring and logging the virtual clusters, backup and disaster recovery mechanisms, and snapshot functionality.

Kubernetes, AI workloads, and Loft Labs’ roadmap

• Gentele discusses Loft Labs’ growth which includes a 4x increase in revenue last year and increasing the number of team members.
• One of the hottest topics in the Kubernetes ecosystem is AI workloads and how to run GPU workloads on Kubernetes.
• Gentele believes Loft Labs is a pioneer in this area and he tells us that Loft Labs is a layer deeper than the application layer. He explains how they want to be an enabler for the platform layer that enables application creation.
• Gentele shares an update on Loft Labs’ roadmap, talking about their open-source project DevPod, which already has 7,000 GitHub stars since being open-sourced nine months ago. He shares some of the key focuses for the project.

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

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.