Loft Labs Expands Kubernetes Support to Virtual Clusters
Loft Labs today announced it has updated its vcluster open source cluster virtualization software to add support for any vanilla distribution of Kubernetes. Previously, the open source vcluster project only supported the lightweight K3s instance of Kubernetes.
Company CEO Lukas Gentele says the goal is to make it easier for IT teams to employ vcluster across staging and production environments. Currently, vcluster is used primarily in pre-production environments, notes Gentele.
As Kubernetes is employed more widely, many IT teams will be looking to centralize cluster management as much as possible. When Kubernetes was initially developed, the expectation was that many applications would share a relatively small number of large clusters. Many IT teams, however, wind up deploying single-tenant Kubernetes clusters simply because they prefer to have their own dedicated platforms rather than having to monitor other applications’ resource consumption.
The issue is that running all those individual Kubernetes clusters tends to increase the total cost of IT at a time when many organizations are struggling to find and retain IT professionals that have Kubernetes expertise.
Loft Labs is making a case for using vcluster as a layer of abstraction to simplify isolating each application running on a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster rather than simply relying on namespaces.
Gentele says a virtual cluster behaves just like any regular Kubernetes cluster. In fact, vcluster is a certified Kubernetes distribution, which means that it passes all conformance tests required by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Those 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.
As Kubernetes management continues to evolve, it’s still not clear the degree to which clusters will be managed by DevOps teams versus traditional IT administrators employing graphical tools. In most organizations, depending on the task, it’s likely to be a mix of both types of IT professionals.
In the meantime, it’s still early days as far as virtualization of Kubernetes clusters is concerned, but as the number of Kubernetes clusters deployed in IT environments continues to increase, finding a way to manage them more efficiently will become a higher priority. The issue many IT organizations will need to resolve is how to address this problem before the number of Kubernetes clusters deployed starts to sprawl out of control.
Many of those clusters are spun up by development teams that don’t always consider the impact that cluster is likely to have on IT operations teams. Ops teams are often asked to assume responsibility for managing those clusters once it’s determined that the life cycle of that project is measured in months rather than days. It is, of course, a lot easier to tear down a virtual cluster.
There may, of course, come a day when the management of Kubernetes clusters is highly automated. For now, however, Kubernetes remains both the most powerful IT platform in recent memory and also the most complex to manage.
