vCluster: Embracing Multitenancy in Kubernetes Era

Enterprises aim to deliver business value while keeping their uptime high and costs low. With the ever-evolving landscape of enterprise technology, that’s an ongoing challenge.

Container orchestrators like Kubernetes have positioned themselves as a defacto way to deploy applications inside organisations, but it comes with additional complexity and cost. The shift towards embracing multitenancy emerges as a transformative strategy for enterprises looking to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments.

Join me in this talk and understand the paradigm shift that enables multiple users or tenants to share a single instance of a cluster while maintaining data isolation, cost and security policies with the help of an opensource tool like vCluster.

By the end, you will learn to save costs and enhance your developer experience with a multitenant architecture.

The limits of multi-tenancy in Kubernetes have made it difficult for platform teams to provide self-service Kubernetes clusters. It's difficult to operate shared clusters even using tools like namespaces, RBAC, and admission control. These issues have driven many platform teams to provision dedicated clusters for product teams or even individual developers, which has resulted in a lot of cluster sprawl. Not only is having lots of Kubernetes clusters costly and a management headache, but it's terrible for the environment, as Holly Cummins pointed out in her KubeCon Europe 2020 keynote.

Virtual clusters allow platform teams to provision shared clusters that are truly self-service for engineers. We've open sourced our virtual cluster implementation vcluster to enable teams using Kubernetes to focus on what they want to be doing: building software that delivers value to businesses and communities.