At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in London, Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele shared exciting developments in the company’s mission to virtualize the entire Kubernetes stack. Building upon their successful vCluster technology, Loft introduced both open source and commercial solutions aimed at addressing diverse multi-tenancy needs in cloud-native environments.

Open Sourcing Rancher Integration for vCluster

Loft has open sourced their Rancher integration for vCluster, making virtual Kubernetes clusters more accessible to the broader Rancher community. This decision came after observing significant demand from Rancher users who were looking to implement vCluster within their existing Rancher deployments.

“We’ve seen a lot of folks in the Rancher GitHub repository open issues saying, ‘Hey, we would love to see vCluster as part of Rancher,'” Gentele explained. While Loft had previously offered a commercial integration, the company recognized the value of making this capability freely available to all Rancher users.

The decision to open source the integration reflects Loft’s philosophy of expanding access to virtualization technologies. Gentele elaborated: “More vCluster in the world is better, so let’s open source this Rancher integration. We actually re-architected it to make it even better integrated in Rancher, and the open source project is available now on GitHub.”

By removing barriers to adoption, Loft enables users to implement virtual clusters regardless of their preferred deployment method. “If people are spinning up vClusters with Helm and Terraform, why would we guard spinning them up with Rancher?” Gentele noted. “As long as it’s an open source vCluster, people should be able to create it in any environment.”

Introducing vNode: Stronger Multi-Tenancy Through Node Virtualization

The more significant announcement was the introduction of vNode, a commercial product that extends Loft’s multi-tenancy capabilities from the control plane to the node level.

“We’ve been virtualizing Kubernetes with vCluster since 2021… we’ve really become the multi-tenancy experts in the Kubernetes space,” Gentele said. “We’ve seen a lot of people ask how to achieve deeper, node-level—or even more advanced—multi-tenancy beyond just control plane isolation.”

vNode addresses the challenge of sharing nodes securely, enabling users to benefit from efficient resource utilization while maintaining stronger isolation between workloads. As Gentele described it: “You can essentially see vNode as virtual nodes that automatically get created on each one of your physical nodes, or virtual machines, whatever is part of your Kubernetes cluster.”

This approach sits in the middle of the multi-tenancy spectrum, offering more isolation than traditional namespace-based separation but with better resource efficiency than completely separate node pools.

“We’ve seen people very successfully even eliminate all of their VMs in their Kubernetes clusters with our virtual stack,” Gentele noted, highlighting the potential for significant infrastructure simplification.

Building a Layered Virtualization Ecosystem

Loft’s product strategy reveals a thoughtful approach to virtualizing the entire Kubernetes stack, with each solution addressing specific challenges while complementing the broader ecosystem.

“We’re layering these products,” Gentele explained. “We have vCluster. We have vNode now in the layer below. We already have DevPod, a project we launched about two years ago as an open source project for specifically dev environments on top of Kubernetes.”

While each product can function independently, they deliver enhanced value when used together, creating a comprehensive virtualization solution. “You can use vNode with regular namespaces. You can use vCluster without vNode,” said Gentele. “But obviously you get a lot of benefit if you combine them.”

Looking Ahead: Cluster Snapshots and Day 2 Operations

Loft continues to innovate with features like vCluster snapshot, which enables rapid backups of entire Kubernetes clusters as OCI artifacts. This open source capability transforms what has traditionally been a complex and time-consuming process into an operation that “takes seconds,” according to Gentele.

The company is also developing commercial extensions to these capabilities, focusing on day-two operations for virtual clusters at scale. Automated backups for entire fleets of virtual clusters are on the roadmap, along with enhanced monitoring and alerting capabilities.

The Vision: Efficiency Through Virtualization

Loft’s expanding portfolio reflects a clear vision for the cloud-native ecosystem—one where virtualization techniques enable more efficient resource utilization without compromising on isolation or security.

“For us, we’re really focused on virtualizing the entire stack,” Gentele emphasized. “Wherever we see inefficiencies—where resource sharing and multi-tenancy could lead to a more efficient Kubernetes architecture—that’s where we’re aiming to optimize, across the whole stack.”

As platform engineering teams continue to face challenges with resource efficiency, secure multi-tenancy, and operational complexity, Loft’s layered approach to Kubernetes virtualization offers a promising path forward.

Guest: Lukas Gentele (LinkedIn)
Company: Loft Labs
Show: KubeStruck