Having virtualized Kubernetes clusters may seem paradoxical. They are, after all, an abstraction in themselves of the virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s.
Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource usage in Kubernetes clusters that VMware experienced with server usage, and created a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications.
Today, the startup announced a $24 million Series A round.
There are a set of applications that run with each Kubernetes environment, like Istio, Rancher, and Vault, and it becomes expensive and difficult to manage and run them on multiple containers, especially as you scale. Loft Labs allows users to share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that virtual machines share server resources.
“We’re basically turning many clusters into one cluster, and then we have virtual clusters on top of the common applications,” CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch.
So rather than running all of your clusters as separate entities, you can just run a few, like one for development, one for staging, and one for production, and all relevant virtual clusters can live in each of them.
“You get all this shared platform stack consolidation that’s a lot cheaper, a lot more efficient, and a lot more consistent, because you only have maybe three instances of Istios running right now instead of of 5,000,” he said. And like virtual machines, you get secure isolation to separate each of these workloads and tenants, and Loft can handle management tasks like automatically shutting down clusters that aren’t in use.
Investors have traditionally valued startups built on popular open source projects because they provide a ready-made sales funnel. But these startups need to find a way to monetize this popularity.
Loft Labs has done both. Since the release of the open source version of the product, vCluster, in 2021, 40 million downloads and the creation of a million virtual clusters have been recorded, suggesting that many people are interested in this concept.
It also released vCluster Pro to monetize the idea in a new way. Most open source startups add enterprise features like security and authentication, or create a SaaS version for easier installation and management. Loft has created a complementary product that helps businesses manage high-volume Kubernetes cluster environments, incentivizing their larger customers to purchase the product.
It took the company a while to get to the point where they built this particular solution. In fact, it all started with a Platform-as-a-Service product that attempted to provide an environment for developers to access shared multi-tenancy clusters, but quickly realized that there was no way to do it. At the same time, it struggled to convince businesses to use the platform and closed its doors.
But as the co-founders did a post-mortem, they realized they had stumbled upon a good idea: “Okay, what have we really learned here? And what we learned was the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in the cluster and how difficult that is. And then we asked ourselves: aren’t other people experiencing the same problem internally, especially in large organizations?
They found their way to vCluster, first releasing another open source project to see if they were onto something. “We launched an open source project called Kiosk, a multi-tenancy extension to test the waters. And it quickly gained momentum,” he said. AWS even included it in their multitenancy best practices guide, giving them more confidence in their idea. “And then, because this experiment was successful, we became obsessed with solving this problem,” he said. The end result was vCluster, which they first released in late 2021.
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 investments. The company has now raised a total of $28.6 million.
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