Loft Labs Makes Virtual K8s Clusters More Accessible

Loft Labs today updated its open source platform for virtualizing Kubernetes clusters to make it possible to use templates to pre-configure virtual clusters on behalf of application development and deployment teams.

Administrators can now define Kubernetes resources, such as manifests and Helm charts, along with any kind of data and configuration that will automatically be deployed into a virtual cluster. Clusters can be created using either the Loft command line interface (CLI), user interface or via the Kubernetes application programming interface (API).

Other new capabilities in version 2.0 of the Loft platform include an ability to set defaults for parameters attached to specific versions of an application or database; the ability to define cluster access permissions via Microsoft Active Directory and a revamped audit log, dubbed Activity Explorer, that makes it easier to track changes to the environment.

Loft Labs CEO Lukas Gentele said the overall goal is to make it easier for development teams to share access to a few large Kubernetes clusters versus requiring IT teams to manage a large fleet of individual Kubernetes clusters.

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. Loft Labs is making a case for an additional layer of abstraction that isolates each application running on a multi-tenant cluster.

It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations will embrace multi-tenancy, but offerings such as vcluster will make easier for the average IT administrator to manage complex Kubernetes environments. One of the things that continues to limit adoption of Kubernetes is a lack of skills. IT administrators don’t typically have the same level of programming expertise as a site reliability engineer (SRE). The challenge is SREs are both hard to find and, given the demand for their expertise, retain.

It’s clear that management of Kubernetes clusters at scale needs to become simpler. There simply are not enough site reliability engineers (SREs) available to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters. The Loft platform provides a way to centralize the management of Kubernetes clusters in a way that enables the average IT administrator to assume more responsibility for managing a smaller number of Kubernetes clusters.

The irony, of course, is that many organizations view Kubernetes as a layer of abstraction above either a virtual or bare-metal server. Loft Labs is essentially adding another layer of abstraction on top of Kubernetes to enable IT teams to create virtual clusters. It’s not clear yet to what degree this approach to virtualizing clusters will gain traction, but Loft Labs claims the vcluster image on Docker Hub has been downloaded more than 120,000 times in the past six months. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to make IT teams more aware of an abstraction that might make Kubernetes a lot easier for the average IT team to realistically manage.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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