DEVOPSdigest

Loft Labs announced Loft v3 with new capabilities and flexibility for platform teams to build and enable their development teams with a self-service Kubernetes.

“Kubernetes is a game changer, but complicated. Now, after a major revamp of our user interface and onboarding experience, Loft v3 provides best-in-class management of virtual Kubernetes clusters – enabling larger organizations to provide self-service clusters to their engineering teams,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO, Loft Labs. “Now, managing Kubernetes has never been easier – and that is something no one ever says!”

New features in Loft v3 include:

- Fully Redesigned User Interface improves navigation organized by Projects, Templates, and Clusters.

- Projects to easily group different types of virtual clusters and spaces together logically for teams to work on while also allowing administrators to define resource limits, configurations, and access controls. This gives teams autonomy with guardrails that administrators configure for specific projects.

- Version Control and Syncing Templates simplify making updates and propagating them across the enterprise by enabling templates for virtual clusters, spaces, and apps to be versioned.

- Deeper Argo CD Integration automatically recognizes virtual clusters created in Loft to add them to Argo CD – including automatic configuration of appropriate user permissions and access control settings for the virtual clusters in Argo. Argo CD users can now deploy to the virtual cluster without any additional effort.

- GitOps-Friendly Deployments gives users the choice of three available options to operate Loft: the newly-designed Loft UI with simplified navigation; an integration to manage with GitOps; a built-in YAML editor to manage Loft resources the same way as any other Kubernetes objects.

Loft v3 now also supports the use of multiple single sign-on (SSO) providers at the same time to help accommodate – even within one enterprise – different groups that are using different SSO technologies for authentication and secure access. And now platform engineers and administrators have fine-grain quota controls over memory and CPU, as well as sleep mode utilization which is a unique feature of Loft to help save costs when resources are not being used, and automatically put to sleep. Quotas can be set by user, team, or project, as well as active clusters. Also, an updated and expanded API reference is added to automate the creation of new projects, virtual clusters, spaces, templates, apps, and more.

With Loft v3, platform teams are able to manage virtual clusters, spaces, and applications at an enterprise scale.

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, either using the Loft UI (user interface), the Loft CLI (command-line interface), or even using the Kubernetes command-line tool kubectl via the custom resources provided as part of Loft.