Loft Labs Bolsters Virtual Kubernetes Cluster Management at Scale
Loft Labs has made available a commercial edition of its open source vCluster software that enables IT teams to virtualize a Kubernetes cluster.
Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele said vCluster.Pro provides IT teams with additional admission security controls to prevent unauthorized changes and an isolated control plane that makes it simpler to run workloads on virtual clusters in production environments at scale.
Other capabilities include integrated CoreDNS software written in Go that consolidates CoreDNS, APIServer and Syncer components into a single pod, a plugin for CoreDNS that makes it possible to open the virtual cluster to reach other services that run in the underlying host cluster—or even in another virtual cluster—and Sync Patches that allow for modifications to resources both during synchronization and before they are applied to the Kubernetes API server of the underlying host cluster.
The vCluster project was originally launched in 2021. Since then, the company claims more than 40 million virtual Kubernetes clusters have been created. vCluster enables IT teams to create lightweight Kubernetes clusters that run inside the namespaces of a multi-tenant cluster. A virtual cluster behaves just like any certified distribution of Kubernetes, which means that it passes all conformance tests required by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). A vCluster can be spun up using either a graphical tool or via the Loft command line interface (CLI) or, alternatively, by using the kubectl CLI that comes with Kubernetes.
Virtual Kubernetes clusters are used most widely in pre-production environments to reduce the total number of physical Kubernetes servers an organization needs to deploy. However, with the arrival of vCluster.Pro the number of instances of virtual clusters being used in production environments is expected to increase as it becomes simpler to manage them at scale, said Gentele.
That’s critical because cloud service providers charge $900 per year for each Kubernetes cluster spun up, so the more virtual clusters an organization can employ, the lower the total cost of deploying Kubernetes becomes, he noted.
More organizations than ever are now deploying Kubernetes clusters at an unprecedented scale. There is a natural tendency to isolate workloads on individual clusters to minimize potential disruption should the underlying infrastructure become unavailable. However, as organizations find themselves managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters, the cost of managing them all can quickly become prohibitive.
As more Kubernetes clusters are deployed, the need to expand the available pool of IT talent capable of managing them becomes more urgent. Many Kubernetes clusters are initially deployed by DevOps engineers who have experience working with YAML files. As the number of clusters increases, however, the need to provide IT administrators with graphical tools to manage Kubernetes clusters is becoming more apparent.
As Kubernetes becomes a mainstream element of enterprise IT environments, the management of physical and virtual Kubernetes clusters is becoming a team sport that requires specialized skills that remain hard to find and retain.