Loft Labs Eyes Higher Tier Of Cloud

The Merchant's House in Shepton Mallet, Somerset on the Buildings at risk register Detail of the ... [+] roof construction which uses principal rafter butt purlins with cranked collars. (Photo by Adrian Sherratt/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)

Software comes in sizes. In the disparate and digitally-defined world of cloud computing, we have to think about enterprise software estates, stacks and entire platforms in their most aggregated (and hopefully not discombobulated) sense. At the same time, we also have to think about the smaller componentized nature of cloud containers, components and coalesced capsules that now make up the orchestrated layer of services that we all use every day.

To gain aggregation from the separation of components and containers, the technology industry has wholeheartedly embraced the open source Kubernetes cloud container orchestration platform.

While the open source purists involved with Kubernetes are still working hard to champion community involvement and the wider engagement of bodies such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), there is also a groundswell of interest in developing commercialized enterprise-grade extensions, skews and add-ons to the open core.

Among those working to make the granular backend simpler to use for organizations that need a specific approach to cloud component control is San Francisco-based Loft Labs.

The firm's specialism is directed towards a project and service product known as vclusters (or virtual clusters). Originally (and still now today also) an open source project, there are over 28 million vclusters so far created on the planet and the Docker container platform ‘images’ (a term that describes a downloadable functional entity of software, either a whole application, an operating system or a smaller component) of vcluster have been downloaded more than 28 million times from Docker Hub.

In total today, the vclusters project has 2,300 stars on GitHub - a means of the community showing its rating and appreciation for good software. So what's happening at Loft Labs and how is its approach to compartmentalized cloud componentry going to help us all when we use enterprise tech?

"You can think of vclusters (or virtual clusters) much the same as virtual machines (VMs) for servers. We as Loft, the company, then add management and security to the open source in the original open source code to create what is now a commercial product. With the uptake in Kubernetes adoption, Loft is seeing increasing traction with customers because it helps control cost and delivers control over Kubernetes wherever it is deployed (on-premises or any cloud) while providing easy entry for developers shielding them from much of the complexity of Kubernetes," explained Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs, in a technical briefing session this January 2023.

As we have said, Loft Labs builds its enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform Loft on top of the open source vcluster project. Loft is used by large organizations to create a self-service platform for their engineering teams. When an enterprise runs Loft, their engineers can provision virtual clusters on-demand whenever they need them and importantly, shut them down when they are no longer needed. In addition, there is a nifty feature that will put vclusters to sleep when they’ve been inactive for a preset amount of time. That is non-trivial for conserving computing resources and a potential big money saver for Kubernetes clusters running in the cloud.

Loft did an analysis of a hypothetical example of an enterprise with 300 single tenant Kubernetes clusters running on Amazon EKS. The estimated cost is $1,642,800 on an annual basis. But, using 300 virtual clusters on one shared Kubernetes cluster would mean instead a total expense of around $997,876 for the year – about 40% savings in cost. Developers would see no difference in their experience.

Founded in 2019, Loft recently (late 2022) announced that it contributed the open source project DevSpace to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud-native software. The CNCF Sandbox provides a neutral home for the project to receive external contributions from the cloud-native community and to benefit from vendor-independent governance. Loft expects to continue as the primary contributor to the project, simply putting the governance in neutral hands.

A vocal commentator on open platform and tool technologies and holder of an emeritus chair position with the CNFC itself is Liz Rice, chief open source officer at Isovalent, an organization that specializes in enterprise solutions to solve networking, security and observability needs.

"In the current economic climate, it's no surprise that organisations are keen to find ways to reduce costs and look to identify tools that can help them identify underutilised resources, or automatically scale deployments according to demand," said Isovalent's Rice. "At the same time, we’ve moved on from some of the ‘Day 1’ issues that users had around Kubernetes and getting started, and now we have to deal with the deeper ‘Day 2’ challenges that exist."

Rice further states that developers using Kubernetes now have a major focus on how they scalably connect, secure and observe the connectivity between these modern API-driven applications. "They must also face up to how they deal with problems like cost management. You need the right data here in order to spot what is costing you money and where you can make savings," stated Rice.

Today, there are hundreds of organizations that use DevSpace to enhance developer velocity and build their cloud-native applications with over 1 million installations and more than 3,200 GitHub stars for the project.

"We strongly believe that Loft Labs will have a major impact on the cloud-native space and on how engineering teams in large enterprises will build cloud-based software in the future," said Lu Zhang, founder and managing partner at Fusion Fund, a lead investor in Loft Labs. Over the past year in 2022, the company increased the number of employees from three to 28.

Loft Labs's customers span from startups Ada, Atlan and HqO to well-established Fortune 500 companies that include one of the largest U.S. financial institutions and one of the world's largest car manufacturers.

The company is stepping up its activities and showing up at more industry events in its efforts to replicate what VMware did in virtual servers. As Kubernetes increases its footprint, there is a good chance we’ll get to know the name Loft aside its open source successes – vcluster and DevSpace.

The loft beckons, does anybody have a ladder?