Loft
Labs
announced the public beta of
vCluster Cloud,
a managed solution that simplifies and reduces the costs of Kubernetes
clusters. vCluster Cloud expands deployment options for enterprises, empowering
more organizations to leverage the benefits of vCluster Platform. With a
managed cloud option, teams can get started even faster, while those preferring
self-hosted deployments retain the flexibility to build their environments as
needed. Additionally, the company introduced the External Database Connector in
Platform v4.1, enabling virtual clusters to seamlessly use external databases
like MySQL and Postgres (e.g., Amazon RDS) as their backing store. This fully
automated feature eliminates manual setup and securely handles credentials for
streamlined database provisioning. Loft will be demonstrating both this week at
KubeCon in booth A6.
"After talking with our
customers and community, we decided to build a cloud-based solution to make it
as easy as possible for teams or individuals to get started exploring vCluster
Platform and managing their Kubernetes clusters," said Lukas Gentele, co-founder
and CEO, Loft Labs. "Our customers achieve up to a 70 percent savings on cloud
costs by virtualizing their clusters, and making this now easier than ever to
achieve makes this available to a larger set of enterprises. We are working
quickly to move vCluster Cloud to GA, and have a number of ideas about how we
can take this even further in the future."
Loft provides an
industry-first alternative to both Kubernetes namespaces and separate clusters,
allowing platform teams to quickly spin up and break down virtual clusters as
needed, utilizing a shared underlying infrastructure with superior isolation and
resource optimization across workloads. Each virtual cluster is an isolated
Kubernetes environment within a host cluster, and has its own dedicated API
server and control plane to maximize flexibility and security.
"Kubernetes clusters often
bring substantial costs and complexity. Virtualizing these clusters can help
enterprises streamline management and reduce expenses," said Paul Nashawaty,
Principal Analyst, Application Development and Modernization at theCube Research.
"By adopting a hosted version of the vCluster Platform, organizations can
quickly access secure and robust cluster management capabilities. This approach
aligns well with industry trends: a recent survey indicated that 78% of
enterprises seek to simplify Kubernetes management, with nearly 60% reporting
that cost reduction is a top driver for adopting managed Kubernetes solutions.
Hosted options like vCluster Platform enable a smoother, more secure entry
point into scalable Kubernetes management."
Management for Virtual
Kubernetes Clusters
Enterprises need to be able
to streamline operations, optimize costs and enhance security across their
fleet of virtual Kubernetes Clusters. vCluster Cloud can help achieve this in
the fastest, most direct way possible. The vCluster Platform offers users a
number of benefits, including:
- Easy
Cluster Management and Secure Access Control -
allowing for the seamless creation of virtual clusters, configuration
tenant access, and secure distribution of kubeconfig files while
integrating with the SSO provider of choice.
- Centralized
Fleet Management - enabling the management and observability of all
clusters central, with a multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and hybrid-cloud
management place.
- Streamlined
Self-Service Provisioning - offering users the option to
provision virtual clusters via the vCluster CLI or UI, via integrations
with Rancher, Terraform, and GitHub Actions or via CRDs and custom code.
- Advanced
Cost Optimization Features - reducing cloud costs and/or
freeing up idle compute in the data center with sleep mode and auto-delete
features triggered by inactivity or timezone-aware cron scheduling.
- Resilient
Guardrails for Governance - establishing resource quotas
and standardized environment templates to ensure fair use and streamlined
configurations, including automated updates and automatic ingress auth to
allow authenticated traffic only.
- Seamless
Integration into Existing IT Ecosystems -
providing the opportunity to adopt virtual clusters with ready-to-use
integrations and deployment guides for most CI/CD platforms, secrets
management tools, observability stacks, service meshes, and more.
- Robust
Enterprise Deployment Options - offering customers the
ability to deploy in their own cloud account or private data center (with
VPC and air-gapped support) and enable high-availability mode or
multi-region mode to meet the most advanced enterprise requirements.