Guest: Lukas Gentele (LinkedIn)
Company: vCluster Labs
Show Name: KubeStruck
Topics: Kubernetes, Cloud Native

In a Kubernetes world full of proprietary distributions, patches, and forks, vCluster Labs is taking a radically simple approach: stick with upstream. As Lukas Gentele, Founder and CEO of vCluster Labs, explains, the team’s philosophy is to stay “as close to vanilla Kubernetes as possible.”

Avoiding the Distro Trap

There was a time when every vendor wanted their own Kubernetes flavor. They’d bolt on custom tooling, tweak APIs, and market it as innovation. But those changes often introduced compatibility issues, lock-in, and delayed patch cycles. Gentele’s team decided to move in the opposite direction.

“We don’t want to meddle with the distro,” he says. “Instead of redesigning Kubernetes, we repackage it.”

That means vCluster uses the exact same upstream Kubernetes binaries, bundled into a single container image. Inside that image, a lightweight process supervisor runs the standard control plane components — just like upstream Kubernetes would. The difference lies in packaging, not in functionality.

Upstream Speed and Security

This approach has a major benefit: agility. Because vCluster tracks the official release cycle, updates and security patches land almost immediately. “If there’s a vulnerability in Kubernetes and they do a patch release today, you’ll get our updated version tomorrow — maybe even today,” Gentele says.

That responsiveness helps teams avoid one of the biggest pain points in enterprise infrastructure — waiting weeks or months for vendor-modified updates to catch up.

Familiar by Design

For developers and platform teams, vCluster feels indistinguishable from standard Kubernetes. Everything behaves the same — the same APIs, tooling, and manifests work out of the box. This seamlessness matters because it reduces cognitive load and prevents teams from being locked into vendor-specific features.

As Gentele puts it, “Customers don’t want to choose a distribution that locks them in. They want upstream Kubernetes.”

Takeaway

By resisting the temptation to reinvent Kubernetes, vCluster Labs is preserving what made the platform powerful in the first place — openness and compatibility. Their “vanilla-first” philosophy ensures that developers and enterprises alike can build confidently, knowing their clusters stay secure, standard, and portable.