I was supposed to record this interview in person at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU with Lukas Gentele, Co-Founder and CEO of Loft Labs, but due to some flight changes we had to do it remotely. Even if we didn’t sit across from each other in the same room, we still had a very insightful discussion as we both got to see and experience the event in-person.

Gentele noticed a lot of ‘end users’ this time as compared to last year’s KubeCon in LA. These were actual practitioners who are using these open source, cloud-native technologies in production.

It was great to see these users at our booth as “ultimately, we’re not building technology for the sake of building technology, but actually to solve problems in these enterprises out there,” he said.

Gentele felt that cost is becoming a real concern for many users and they are looking at ways to control costs associated with cloud computing. In fact there is a new project by Kubecost called OpenCost which is aimed at helping companies monitor and save costs in their cloud environment.

No surprises that a lot of people who visited Loft Labs booth were interested in learning more about the cost savings that the company’s open source project vcluster provides.

Gentele felt that multi-tenancy and security were other big topics at the conference. Talking about multi-tenancy and complexity that comes with it, he said, “Instead of provisioning 1,000 Kubernetes clusters, how can you actually split up workloads and have them run alongside each other in a secure way in a shared Kubernetes cluster? That’s the kind of multi-tenancy people are looking at,” said Gentele. “How do you host multiple tenants or teams in the same cluster? That’s an ongoing challenge.”

He is confident that a lot of solutions will emerge in that space and Loft Labs has a head start with vcluster.

For the uninitiated, vcluster is the only certified Kubernetes distro that allows developers to spin up virtual Kubernetes clusters. “There are clusters that run on the top of other clusters,” said Gentele, “Developers can spin up a cluster in Bare Metal or in Google Cloud or AWS and then inside of the name spaces of that cluster, they can launch other clusters that run inside containers and those are virtual clusters.”

We also talked about the announcement of a Cluster API provider for the vcluster project – which helps with creating fully functional virtual Kubernetes clusters.

Check out the full interview in the video to dive deeper into the discussion.

Connect with Lukas Gentele (LinkedIn)