Loft Labs announces vCluster integration with Rancher

Bart: Who are you? What's your role? And who do you work for?

Lukas: Yeah, I'm Lukas Gentele, CEO and co-founder of Loft Labs. We're the creators of Vcluster. We launched an open source project in 2021. So we've been around for about three years and we have a pretty vibrant open source community in this project. Really excited to be at KubeCon every year and get to meet with all of our community users.

Bart: What do you want to share today?

Lukas: We're announcing a Rancher integration here at KubeCon. You can essentially create virtual Kubernetes clusters in Rancher, which is really exciting because, you know, Rancher, you can create real clusters, you can create namespaces. And vCluster, you know, virtual clusters, they're kind of in the middle. So now you can also self-service provision virtual clusters directly in Rancher with the same user experience. And that's obviously great for everyone that's already using Rancher for cluster management and is familiar with that UX.

Bart: What problem does vCluster solve?

Lukas: So virtual clusters sit in the middle between real clusters. Clusters and namespaces. So it's ultimately about multi-tenancy. A lot of companies, especially the enterprise, they can't really share a cluster today because the only way to share a cluster really is to use namespaces. But namespaces are not really any level of isolation. And locking a team or an engineer into a namespace... With like RBAC, network policies, resource quota, etc. A namespace is often not good enough for them. If you want to install CRDs and you want to, you know, deploy operators and really do more than just one namespace, like, you know, have communication across namespaces, for example, then things get really complicated with namespaces. But, you know, creating hundreds or even thousands of real clusters is just really expensive and it's really hard to manage as well. Just think about running 500 clusters means running 500 times Istio. and OPA and all these different components in your cluster. And that's very, very hard to manage and keep in sync over time. With a vCluster, you can create a cluster inside a pod that runs inside another cluster. So you can now share an Istio and share an OPA because it runs on the same cluster, but you get more access than just with a namespace. You feel like inside you have your real, fully-blown own cluster, but you're actually just running inside another shared cluster.

Bart: Could you share the before and after this product announcement?

Lukas: Yeah, previously we've seen a lot of Rancher users try to integrate vCluster into Rancher, but that's not easy. And if you go to the Rancher GitHub repository and you search the term vCluster, you'll find a lot of issues and a lot of questions and people asking for, hey, can't we get an official integration to spin up vClusters, set up virtual cluster self-service in Rancher? And we saw that demand of the user community. And essentially that's what we're doing. Lack of a solution and we're like, hey, we got to build something. So that's what we did. We had one enterprise approach us in the fall last year and they were essentially saying we have this huge Rancher footprint. We already do self-service namespaces with Rancher. People want their own clusters, but clusters are expensive. So we can't give them any clusters. So now how can we provision the clusters with Rancher? So we partnered up with them, worked on this Rancher integration and now we have a whole bunch more Rancher community users that are interested in this piece. And now it's pretty easy. You install the integration and you're ready to go.

Bart: Is vCluster open source and part of the CNCF landscape?

Lukas: Yeah, vCluster is open source. You find us on the landscape. We're actually a certified Kubernetes distro. So we pass all the CNCF conformance tests for Kubernetes clusters. So every time we launch a new version, we run through all these tests to make sure that when you're migrating from, you know, let's say EKS or GKE, ...to handing those clusters out directly to then, you know, spin up virtual clusters in a GKE or EKS cluster and then... Giving people access to the virtual cluster, that they actually don't need to refactor anything, they don't need to change their code, right? It's really important to be compliant Kubernetes, and that makes the lift and shift super straightforward, right? You just have a different kube context. It's just like using a different cluster, but it's a fully compliant cluster, so everything works as before.

Bart: What's Loft Labs'business model?

Lukas: Yeah, so here at Loft, we have a commercial version of vCluster Pro, and vCluster Pro is essentially a more secure... more scalable and a more resilient version with added security features and enterprise-grade deployment options for vCluster. So if you are not just deploying a few virtual clusters, but hundreds or even thousands of them, then it's a great solution to orchestrate your virtual clusters and to establish things like self-service, hook up to your enterprise SSO, set up things like audit logging, right? But also, you know, there's features where you can run the control. Control plane of the virtual cluster in one cluster, but then spin up workloads created in the virtual cluster that get launched in a different cloud or in a different cluster. And those kind of features that really are enterprise-grade, they're part of our vCluster Pro offering.

Bart: Who are your main competitors?

Lukas: Honestly, I think probably the status quo is our main competitor. So really people that spin up individual clusters today are essentially changing their habits towards spinning up virtual clusters. It's kind of like when, you know, Docker started and containers started, right? There were a lot of people that had questions around how secure is this? Is this S? secure and reliable as our VMs are, right? And then suddenly, you know, people start experimenting with containers, they start to trust it. And then the question shifts from, is this as secure and is this as stable as VMs to what else can we do with containers, right? And today the world runs on containers. So I think really our main competitor is the status quo. There are not really any other enterprise-grade solutions to run virtual clusters with. I think we're the only really dominant player in the virtual cluster space.

Bart: What differentiates vCluster? and Loft Labs from the competition.

Lukas: So I think the main offering we have is essentially reducing cost compared to spinning up clusters. When you look at the majority of enterprises that's using a large number of clusters, they all do fleet management, right? So you're seeing like 500 or 1,000 clusters being spun up. And the classical answer by a lot of cloud providers and a lot of other vendors in the space is fleet management. Let's automate things, right? Let's write a glue code and let's really streamline operations to spin up and upgrade and equip these clusters with tooling. And we looked at this problem, we're like, actually the architecture is wrong. We should be using multi-tenant clusters and we should have these large shared clusters. So it's a really different architectural approach than what anybody else does. And then the question is obviously, well, now you kind of need fleet management for virtual clusters. And again, that's what we do in the commercial side.