Virtualizing Kubernetes clusters may seem like a paradox. After all, they are themselves an abstraction of the virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s. Loft Labs saw Kubernetes clusters as having the same resource utilization problem that VMware had with servers, and created a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications.
Today, the startup announced a $24 million Series A raise. There are a set of applications that run in every Kubernetes environment, such as Istio, Rancher, and Vault, and managing and running them across multiple containers becomes costly and cumbersome, especially when scaling. Loft Labs allows users to share these common applications across multiple virtual clusters, similar to the way virtual machines share server resources.
So that’s why Loft Labs allows users to share these common applications across multiple virtual clusters.
«Essentially, we’re turning multiple clusters into a single cluster, and then creating virtual clusters on top of shared applications, — CEO Lucas Gentele told TechCrunch.
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This way, instead of running all clusters as separate entities, you can run just a few — for example, one for development, one for staging and one for production — and all the corresponding virtual clusters can live in each of them». «You get consolidation of a common platform stack, which is much cheaper, much more efficient, much more consistent, because now you only have three Istios instances running instead of 5,000, — he says. As with virtual machines, you get secure isolation to separate each of those workloads and tenants, and Loft can handle management tasks, such as automatically shutting down unused clusters».
However, it’s a great way to manage your workloads and tenants, and Loft can handle management tasks, such as automatically shutting down unused clusters.
Investors traditionally like startups built on popular open source projects because they provide a ready-made sales funnel. But such startups have to figure out a way to monetize that popularity. Loft Labs has done both. Since the open source version of the product, vCluster, was released in 2021, there have been 40 million downloads and one million virtual clusters created, suggesting that many people are interested in the concept.
A lot of people are interested in the concept.
The company also released vCluster Pro to monetize the idea in a new way. Most open source startups add some enterprise features, such as security and authentication, or create a SaaS version to simplify installation and management. Loft has created an add-on product that helps companies manage high-volume Kubernetes clustered environments, which encourages their largest customers to buy the product.
It took the company some time to come up with this particular solution. In fact, it started with a Platform as a Service product that tried to provide an environment for developers to access shared multi-tenant clusters, but quickly realized it couldn’t do that. At the same time, she had a hard time convincing enterprises to use the platform, so she discontinued the business.
At the same time, she had a hard time convincing enterprises to use the platform, so she stopped.
But when the co-founders did a post-mortem, they realized they had stumbled upon a good idea: «OK, what did we actually learn here? And we learned about the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in a cluster, and how difficult that is. And then we asked ourselves, do other people face the same problem internally, especially in large organizations? » They found their way to vCluster, first releasing another open source project to see if they had something.
«We launched an open source project called Kiosk, a multiplayer extension, to see what would happen. And it gained momentum pretty quickly, —he says. AWS even included it in their multi-tenant best practices guide, which gave them more confidence in their idea». «And then, because the experiment was successful, we became obsessed with solving that problem» — he says. The result was vCluster, which they first released at the end of 2021.
And that’s what they’re doing.
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Today’s round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Emergent Ventures, Fusion Fund and Surface Ventures, as well as additional angel investment. To date, the company has raised a total of $28.6 million.
By ForGeeks 
