Virtualizing a Kubernetes cluster may seem contradictory. After all, these are abstractions of the virtual machines themselves, popularized by his VMware in the early 2000s.
Loft Labs recognized the same problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization and built virtualization tools that increase efficiency by sharing a common underlying application. did.
Today, the startup announced a $24 million Series A.
There are a set of applications that run in any Kubernetes environment, such as Istio, Rancher, and Vault, and managing and running them across multiple containers becomes expensive and unwieldy, especially as you scale. Loft Labs allows users to share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that VMs share server resources.
CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch, “We're essentially turning many clusters into one cluster and putting a virtual cluster on top of a common application.”
So instead of running all your clusters as separate entities, you can simply run a few clusters, such as one for development, one for staging, and one for production, and all associated virtual Clusters can exist within their own clusters.
“We probably only have three Istios instances running today instead of 5,000, so consolidating all of the shared platform stacks is much cheaper, much more efficient, and much more consistent.” he said. And like virtual machines, you can securely isolate these workloads and tenants from each other, and Loft can handle administrative tasks such as automatically shutting down unused clusters.
Investors traditionally prefer startups built on popular open source projects. Because they provide you with a sales funnel right away. But such startups have to figure out how to monetize their popularity.
Loft Labs does both. Since the release of vCluster, the open source version of this product in 2021, there have been 40 million downloads and the creation of his 1 million virtual clusters, and many people are interested in the concept. You can see that
We also released vCluster Pro to monetize this idea in new ways. Most open source startups add enterprise features such as security and authentication, or build SaaS versions for easier installation and management. Loft has built complementary products that allow enterprises to manage his high-capacity Kubernetes cluster environments. This will encourage maximum customers to buy your product.
It took the company some time to build this particular solution. In fact, it started as a platform-as-a-service product that tried to provide an environment for developers to access shared multi-tenant clusters, but quickly realized there was no way to do that. At the same time, it became difficult to convince companies to use the platform and it closed down.
But when the co-founders were doing a post-mortem, they realized they had a good idea. And what we learned was the issue of sharing Kubernetes clusters, separating tenants within a cluster, and how difficult it is. And we asked ourselves, aren't others having the same problem internally, especially in large organizations? ”
They found their way to vCluster and first released another open source project to see if they had figured something out. “We launched an open source project called Kiosk, a multi-tenancy extension to test the waters. And it quickly gained considerable traction,” he said. AWS has incorporated this into their multi-tenancy best practices guide, giving us even more confidence in the idea. “And because that experiment was successful, we became obsessed with solving this problem,” he said. The result was vCluster, first released at the end of 2021.
Today's round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Emergent Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Surface Ventures, with additional angel investment. The company has now raised a total of $28.6 million.