Loft Accelerates Deployments with Ephemeral Kubernetes Environments for CI/CD Pipelines

Loft Launches direct integration for creating virtual clusters via GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#KubernetesClusters—Loft Labs, which enables platform teams in enterprises to give engineers self-service access to Kubernetes, today announced integrations with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD. This enables users to create ephemeral Kubernetes clusters in order to preview applications and run test suites as part of CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) pipelines. A Terraform and additional integrations with other popular provisioning tools are planned to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Until now, there have only been two options for creating ephemeral Kubernetes deployments, which both have their limitations: Namespaces, which have a weak isolation and often lack capabilities for proper evaluation of deployments; or fully fledged Kubernetes clusters which take a long time to spin up and can be very expensive to run during the pipeline execution.

“Our integrations will allow organizations to further shift left and to speed up software deployments by enabling engineers to spin up ephemeral Kubernetes clusters,” said Fabian Kramm, CTO of Loft Labs. “The best part of these new integrations is that engineers can use them with the tooling that they are already familiar with when they want to provision virtual clusters. This allows engineers to make use of these ephemeral environments without requiring them to change their toolchain or learn a bunch of new things. Our virtual clusters are easy to spin up using these integrations and they work just like any regular Kubernetes cluster.”

Now, with Loft, developers have the option to create lightweight Kubernetes-based ephemeral environments in the form of isolated namespaces and virtual Kubernetes clusters. These isolated namespaces are created automatically and cluster admins can enable strict workload and tenant isolation, so that organizations can host multiple teams and their applications in the same clusters without running into conflicts and without compromising cluster security and stability. Compared to namespaces, virtual Kubernetes clusters give developers an even better isolation and even more flexibility by provisioning a separate Kubernetes API server and an independent data store, so that these virtual clusters appear like entirely different clusters and can even have different Kubernetes versions. However, under the hood, the containers started in a virtual cluster actually run inside the underlying host cluster which makes virtual clusters very lightweight and cost efficient.

Loft Labs is the creator of several popular open-source projects in cloud-native technology. Over 4,000 engineers have starred the company’s projects on GitHub and its open-source project DevSpace has been downloaded over 300,000 times. The company is a member of the Linux Foundation as well as of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

CEO Lukas Gentele will be speaking about the company’s open-source technology vcluster at this year’s KubeCon North America in Los Angeles. The vcluster technology powers Loft’s virtual clusters and recently became the first certified Kubernetes distribution for spinning up virtual Kubernetes clusters.

On www.loft.sh, you can learn more about ephemeral CI/CD environments with Loft.

About Loft Labs

Loft Labs was founded in 2019 after the founders went through UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator program. The company’s mission is to enable any organization to expand self-service access to Kubernetes and the team has created several open-source projects to support this mission, including DevSpace, vcluster, jsPolicy and kiosk. The company’s commercial product, Loft, ties these open-source projects together into a single Kubernetes platform that companies can use to provide engineers with secure but unimpeded access to cloud resources and to make the switch to truly cloud-native engineering practices.