Loft Labs is a company that builds the next generation virtualization for the cloud – virtual Kubernetes clusters. Pulse 2.0 interviewed co-founder and CEO Lukas Gentele to learn more about Loft and its work in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Lukas Gentele’s Background
What is Lukas Gentele’s background? Gentele said:
“I have been coding since age 12 or 13, and started my first company at 16 in Germany; it built and operated websites or online shops for local businesses. I started another company in college to provide custom software development services to clients. Through that business, I met and hired a lot of great engineers including my current cofounder and Loft Labs’ CTO Fabian Kramm. We began working heavily with Docker and Kubernetes, and built DevSpace, which is an open source developer tool for Kubernetes. Although DevSpace was built for our own use, we put it on GitHub given the thriving open source community around Docker and Kubernetes.”
“DevSpace really resonated with users, which got us hooked on the culture of open source. It was fun to see people trying our project, and the feedback from open source users prompted us to try and build a backend for DevSpace to productize it. That startup ultimately failed, but we learned how hard it is to build, share, and run large Kubernetes clusters while keeping costs contained. If our startup had that problem, we realized enterprises must have it too, which led us to invent the virtual cluster.”
Formation Of Loft Labs
How did the idea for the company come together? Gentele shared:
“After the startup around DevSpace failed, we had a strong feeling that Kubernetes multi-tenancy was still a massive unsolved problem — we launched an open source project called Kiosk to validate that assumption. We gained a few hundred GitHub stars quickly, and a couple weeks after releasing Kiosk, Amazon Web Services (AWS) put us in their best practice guide for Kubernetes multi-tenancy, which told us even they didn’t have great answers for this issue. We then took a step back to understand how we could solve multi-tenancy in a powerful, clean way. That led us to invent virtual Kubernetes clusters with vCluster.”
“k3v was an inspiration, too. It is an open source project by Darren Shepherd that virtualizes k3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution. Darren put k3v on GitHub two years before we invented vCluster, and it never got fleshed out. We took the basic idea and got it to production readiness in our own way, with vCluster. Darren was one of the first people we showed vCluster to, and is now on our cap table and advises our CTO, which has been great. Overall, we saw that companies were struggling with resource management and isolation in Kubernetes environments, and we wanted to provide a scalable and secure solution.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Gentele reflected:
“One of the most interesting experiences was back when we had just started Loft Labs and released vCluster. We were raising seed funding in 2021, and I planned to begin looking for smaller customers like startups, because I had experience selling to them. I had been telling investors we would start with midmarket and work our way up to the enterprise, but one investor in particular shifted my thinking by advising us to start with the enterprise, since vCluster really needs scale to be effective.”
“I was skeptical at first, but his advice was spot-on. The first two real customers we signed within a couple of months were both Fortune 500 companies. And as we started putting out content, speaking at conferences, posting on social media, and trying to get the Loft Labs message out, it actually resonated immediately with the enterprise. They were reaching out with interest and asking for demos, which was really exciting and unexpected.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Gentele explained:
“Our flagship product is vCluster, a virtual Kubernetes cluster that helps companies streamline cluster management without compromising security. Virtual clusters are essentially virtual isolated Kubernetes environments within a single physical cluster. They operate identically to traditional Kubernetes clusters without heavyweight platform stack components like Istio and Open Policy Agent, providing significant cloud cost savings via enhanced efficiency and operational control.”
“Key vCluster features include full isolation, scalability, and compatibility with existing Kubernetes tools, which make it ideal for development, testing, and production environments. We are a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, so the lift and shift is seamless. vCluster also provides ‘sleep mode,’ which can detect if someone is currently working, and automatically scale down nodes so that only necessary resources are being utilized.”
“We also created DevPod in 2023, an open source tool for creating and managing dev environments without a heavyweight server-side setup. DevPod lets developers spin up environments in seconds, and creates environments based on devcontainer.json, or analyzes a developer’s project to provide a best-estimate environment. Developers can switch between local and cloud-powered environments as needed, and it works with both public and private repos.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Gentele and the team face in building the company? Gentele acknowledged:
“A recent challenge has been the rapid changes in compliance and security requirements for cloud-native technologies, like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU. We’ve responded by continuously updating our products to meet the latest security standards and by providing our clients with robust support to navigate these changes.”
“Another challenge is the proliferation of buzzwords around the work we’re doing – right now, everyone has a platform engineering story, which makes it harder to differentiate the actual value of our products. We try to be specific about the value of vCluster and DevPod as ‘building blocks’ for platform creators to create more velocity and self-service, while still offering security and standardization – especially for large organizations.”
“It can also be challenging to convince people they need yet another layer of virtualization. A lot of the work we do in evangelizing vCluster is convincing teams that no matter what their current system looks like, virtual clusters are the right architectural choice, for today and for the future. While shifting to new frameworks is costly up front, sticking with an inefficient cloud strategy will end up being much more costly down the line.”
Evolution Of Loft Labs’ Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Gentele noted:
“Since launching, we have made improvements in scalability, security features, and user interface. We’ve also expanded our product line to include additional tools that integrate with vCluster to provide a more comprehensive solution for Kubernetes management. One exciting release was our Rancher integration this year, which provides simplified multi-cluster management for Rancher users. They can provision, configure, and manage virtual clusters directly through the familiar Rancher interface, with enhanced isolation and security benefits.”
“There are also major updates in vCluster v0.20, which moved to GA in August 2024. To boost user experience, we now have a unified Helm chart for simplified deployment, a new intuitive vcluster.yaml configuration and docs, and a vCluster CLI command to convert old values. We also made Vanilla K8s the default distro for wider compatibility, and added external etcd support for K3s and K0s for greater flexibility. Those are some small examples of our overall evolution into a user-friendly, widely-adopted tool that is suitable for even the most complex enterprise use cases.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Gentele cited:
“The first was launching vCluster as an open source project in April 2021 – that marked the beginning of our journey as the only dedicated solution for virtualizing Kubernetes clusters. This past year, we also announced our Series A funding which was a meaningful sign of growth and validation for our vision.”
“Reaching 5,000 GitHub stars was also really meaningful to us because it proved that users were finding a lot of value in our solution; similarly, hitting 40 million downloads of vCluster was a significant achievement. And of course, securing our first Fortune 500 customers was exciting; after that, signing our 100th customer was an important moment.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Gentele about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Atlan, a popular metadata platform, utilized vCluster to move from 100 EKS clusters – one full-blown EKS cluster for each individual customer – to a new multi-tenant architecture with 20 EKS clusters For more than 100 customers. Atlan initially created individual clusters because many of their customers are in healthcare, finance, and other critical sectors, so they place a heavy premium on ensuring the highest level of data privacy and isolation. They built a homegrown solution around CloudFormation, but it was costly, time-consuming, difficult to maintain, and did not support a multi-cloud strategy.”
“With Loft, Atlan can now spin up one lightweight virtual cluster per customer, which drastically reduces costs given there are fewer physical clusters. Loft’s tooling for managing virtual clusters at scale also allows Atlan to manage virtual clusters across different clusters and even across cloud platforms. Atlan cites Loft’s fast support as a major benefit, and crucially, they do not need to open a ticket for issues. With Slack Connect, Atlan received a private Slack channel visible directly in their own Slack workspace, so the team can chat in real-time with Loft’s support engineers. This makes reporting issues faster and allows for a faster back-and-forth via Slack when collaborative debugging is required to get to the bottom of an issue.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Gentele affirmed:
“What sets us apart is our focus on virtualization within Kubernetes, allowing users to maximize resource efficiency and reduce costs without sacrificing performance. Our solution is also one of the most user-friendly on the market, simplifying the complex processes typically associated with Kubernetes.”
“While a few other vendors offer virtual clusters, such as Spectro Cloud’s Palette Virtual Clusters, no other vendor is dedicated to Kubernetes virtualization. Further, there is no risk of large cloud providers developing competitive offerings as it would directly reduce their own revenue.”
“On the DevPod side, there is no other tool that provides a consistent cloud-based development environment and access to GPUs for developers and platform engineers without vendor lock-in. DevPod is the only such tool that is 100% free and open source.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Gentele pointed out:
“Looking forward, we aim to expand our global presence, build more partnerships with other innovative cloud-native technologies, and continue to support our customers by providing innovative, reliable, and secure solutions.”
“We are currently building functionality in vCluster to ‘snapshot’ a virtual cluster. The same way you would take a snapshot of a VM and move it to a different physical server, we want to let users snapshot an entire Kubernetes cluster and move it to a different cloud provider. This is not really possible with physical clusters; you can back them up and restore them, but those are heavyweight processes. We are adding a feature to take a quick snapshot of a virtual cluster, and then roll it back or migrate it, which will give our users unparalleled flexibility. We are also developing a vCluster cost calculator, which is really exciting. It will let users input details about their current Kubernetes workloads, and immediately see how much they would save from shifting to virtual clusters.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Gentele concluded:
“I’d love to highlight the importance of open source in driving innovation in technology. At Loft Labs, we maintain several open source projects and are committed to contributing to and supporting the community, fostering a collaborative ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders.”
“I would also highlight the importance of focusing on sustainability, because AI workloads will require more energy than is currently available in our power grids, and we will face significant limits to progress and innovation if energy consumption is limited. One way to mitigate this is to reduce unnecessary waste from running idle computing resources. vCluster fits into this story because we help organizations eliminate wasted compute, thereby cutting down unnecessary energy used to run these superfluous resources.”
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