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

There has already been a shift towards virtualization with many enterprises nowadays needing a server where they will spin up a virtual machine. We are also seeing a similar shift toward the virtualization of Kubernetes. One company that is bolstering Kubernetes virtualization is Loft Labs with their open-source project, vCluster.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele talks about the evolution of vCluster, its community, and where it fits in with the ecosystem. He goes on to talk about what the shift toward platform engineering means for organizations. Finally, he gives us a teaser of some of the key focuses for Loft Labs in the near future.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Gentele talks about Loft Labs’ growth over the past two and half years and the success of their open-source project, vCluster. He talks about the adoption of vCluster and the commercial success they have experienced with some of the world’s largest enterprises.
• vCluster started two and a half years ago and Gentele tells us about its extraordinary growth since then. He discusses how most enterprises need a server today and will spin up a virtual machine, and he believes there will be a similar shift toward virtual Kubernetes clusters and he talks about the benefits of virtual clusters.
• Gentele discusses the community around vCluster and how they are helping each other with creating, pull requests, and suggesting new features.
• One of the things some organizations are doing is taking existing products and applying them to the latest buzzword, which is platform engineering. Gentele talks about Loft Labs’ different approach that focuses on vCluster being a great building block for a platform team to build on top of without saying how people should be doing things.
• Gentele tells us about the community around Kubernetes and the events like KubeCon. He feels that there is an abundance of knowledge exchange and inspiration during these events as the community comes together.
• We have progressed from DevOps and the shift left movement to platform engineering. Gentele discusses how shifting left slowed engineers down. He talks about the role of platform engineering within organizations and how they are working on standardization and streamlining processes without hurting the developer experience.
• Gentele talks about Loft Labs’ partnership with CoreWeave. CoreWeave builds on open source and shares what they are building internally, which not every cloud vendor will do. He explains the key focuses of CoreWeave and why the partnership is so fruitful.
• Gentele talks about CoreWeave’s customers, many of whom are leading-edge AI companies that want to build AI workloads on Kubernetes. He goes on to discuss the different options that are available to them, whether that’s heavyweight clusters or lightweight virtual clusters with the possibility of shared nodes.
• One of today’s hottest topics is generative AI and Gentele discusses how Kubernetes is becoming very good at running large-scale distributed systems like AI/ML systems. He goes on to talk about how companies are building AI into their products to help with facilitating, managing, and debugging Kubernetes.
• Gentele takes us through what is in the pipeline for Loft Labs saying they are working on some new features and integrations. He discusses some of the new capabilities for clusters they are working on such as being able to snapshot and restore virtual clusters.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.