SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Loft Labs, the first and only Platform Engineering Platform, today launched vCluster.Pro, the commercial version of its open-source project vCluster, which became the de facto industry standard for virtual Kubernetes clusters. Loft Labs created the vCluster project in 2021 and as of today, engineers have created more than 40 million virtual clusters using vCluster. With the new enterprise edition called vCluster.Pro, Loft Labs meets growing demand from end-users to run vCluster at enterprise-scale and with rock-solid security controls.
“Kubernetes is the technical backbone of thousands of enterprises, including the most cutting-edge companies in the world. It has the power to accelerate innovation and deliver scalability and operational stability. vCluster has helped thousands of software engineers unlock the benefits of Kubernetes faster and at lower cost, but that was just the beginning,” said Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft Labs. “With vCluster.Pro, we’re helping our most advanced customers run virtual Kubernetes clusters at an unprecedented scale and with rock-solid enterprise-grade security and performance enhancements. vCluster.Pro enables our customers to build and manage compute-intensive, industry-defining products and services on virtual Kubernetes clusters.”
CoreWeave is among the first companies to adopt vCluster.Pro and was involved as a design partner from day one. CoreWeave is a specialized cloud provider of large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads. The company offers serverless Kubernetes architecture, delivering the industry’s fastest spin-up times, most responsive autoscaling, and ability to “burst” across hundreds – to – thousands of GPUs per workload. To operate Kubernetes at this scale, virtual clusters provided the most cost-efficient and high-performance solution for CoreWeave, and vCluster.Pro added the security controls and scalability features the company needed to run Kubernetes for their fast-growing customer base.
“Our Kubernetes architecture is one of our key competitive differentiators. We had been monitoring vCluster as an open-source technology since 2021, but the commercial offering and support that Loft Labs built around the core technology made it possible for us to ultimately incorporate virtual Kubernetes clusters into our cloud architecture,” said Brian Venturo, CTO of CoreWeave. “vCluster.Pro is the first proven solution for operationalizing virtual Kubernetes clusters at scale and we continue to be impressed by the Loft Labs team and the innovations they ship to customers like us.”
vCluster.Pro expands on vCluster’s virtualization capabilities to provide the following additional benefits:
Enterprise-Grade Security & Tenant Isolation
- Isolated Control Plane allows companies to run the virtual clusters’ control plane components in a separate cluster, isolated from the workloads created by tenants within the virtual cluster. This isolation of control planes from the workloads is important to run virtual clusters in production and allows enterprises to run multiple workloads anywhere while ensuring stable operation, high availability and strict access control for the most critical component of a virtual cluster—the control plane.
- Virtual Admission Control enables admins to define admission control restrictions that are enforced at the virtual cluster level rather than just at the host cluster level. This additional level of admission control ensures that users cannot make unauthorized changes to essential resources even when they have cluster-admin permissions, creating an additional layer of control and security.
Enhanced Cost Efficiency & Performance
- Integrated CoreDNS consolidates all three vCluster components—CoreDNS, APIServer and Syncer—into a single pod, simplifying the architecture and making virtual clusters even more lightweight and faster to start.
- Cross-Cluster DNS provides a CoreDNS plugin bundled into vCluster.Pro which gives admins the capability to open the virtual cluster up to reach other services that run in the underlying host cluster or even in another virtual cluster. After an admin adds a service to the allow list, users inside the virtual cluster can reach this service via cluster-internal DNS hostnames, which is convenient and secure.
- Sync Patches allow for modifications to resources during synchronization and before they are applied to the Kubernetes API server of the underlying host cluster. This versatility enhances control and customization over resource-handling in the Kubernetes environment.
For more information on vCluster.Pro features and functionality, and to deploy today, click here.
About Loft Labs
Loft Labs is the first and only Platform Engineering Platform. Loft Labs provides Kubernetes-native tools, functionality and frameworks purpose-built for platform engineers to manage, activate and optimize their platform stack. Loft Labs empowers platform teams at 100+ enterprises globally to harmonize engineering velocity and operational stability, and to build and run digital platforms at scale.
Jim Dalin
loftlabs@launchsquad.com
