San Francisco - Loft Labs, which enables any organization to scale self-service access to Kubernetes to hundreds or even thousands of engineers, today announced that the latest version v0.3 of their open-source technology vcluster is now a certified Kubernetes distribution that passes 100% of Kubernetes conformance tests.
vcluster allows engineers to spin up lightweight, virtual Kubernetes clusters that run inside the namespaces of an underlying Kubernetes cluster. This approach reduces cluster sprawl, allows for more secure and better maintainable multi-tenancy, and aims for more efficient resource sharing, which ultimately saves a lot of infrastructure cost.
“Virtualizing Kubernetes is a very challenging technical problem,” said Fabian Kramm, CTO of Loft Labs. “And passing 100% of all Kubernetes conformance tests and getting certified is an additional challenge. Our goal is that virtual clusters are as close to real clusters as possible and users won’t even notice that they are running inside a virtual cluster. I like to think of it like trying to pass the Turing Test for Kubernetes.”
vcluster is stepping into the footsteps of an earlier project called k3v, which was a first proof-of-concept for virtualizing Kubernetes based on the popular k3s distribution. Both projects have been initiated by Darren Shepherd, Chief Architect at SUSE and former CTO of Rancher Labs.
Originally developed as a feature for Loft’s commercial product for self-service Kubernetes development environments, Loft Labs has open-sourced vcluster as a separate project in April 2021 to make it easier for other organizations to join the vision to virtualize Kubernetes. Since then, vcluster has gained considerable attention in the cloud-native community and gained the trust of large enterprises and thought leaders in the space.
“Being able to demonstrate Kubernetes compliance for virtual clusters is an important signal for existing and prospective users of vcluster because it ensures that users can seamlessly use all their favorite cloud-native tools with vcluster just like with any other certified Kubernetes distribution,” said Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft Labs. “Since the launch of vcluster, we have seen users deploy virtual clusters and gain trust in our technology. Now with vcluster becoming a certified Kubernetes distro, organizations get another data point that will reinforce their confidence that virtual clusters are a technology they can use to deploy software at scale.”
David McKay from Equinix will be hosting the live session “Hands-on Introduction to vcluster” today (Tuesday, June 22) at 1 pm Eastern time with Lukas Gentele and Rich Burroughs, senior developer advocate at Loft Labs.
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