vcluster loft-sh

  <img src="docs/static/media/vcluster_horizontal_orange_white.svg" width="600" />

🚀 Get Started Quickly!

Deploy your first virtual cluster with minimal effort:

brew install loft-sh/tap/vcluster
vcluster create my-vcluster --namespace team-x

For detailed steps, visit our Quickstart Documentation.

🌟Why vCluster?

Robust Security and Isolation

• Granular Permissions:
  vCluster users operate with minimized permissions in the host cluster, significantly reducing the risk of privileged access misuse. Within their vCluster, users have admin-level control, enabling them to manage CRDs, RBAC, and other security policies independently.

• Isolated Control Plane:
  Each vCluster comes with its own dedicated API server and control plane, creating a strong isolation boundary.

• Customizable Security Policies:
  Tenants can implement additional vCluster-specific governance, including OPA policies, network policies, resource quotas, limit ranges, and admission control, in addition to the existing policies and security measures in the underlying physical host cluster.

• Enhanced Data Protection:
  With options for separate backing stores, including embedded SQLite, etcd, or external databases, virtual clusters allow for isolated data management, reducing the risk of data leakage between tenants.

Access for Tenants

• Full Admin Access per Tenant:
  Tenants can freely deploy CRDs, create namespaces, taint, and label nodes, and manage cluster-scoped resources typically restricted in standard Kubernetes namespaces.

• Isolated yet Integrated Networking:
  While ensuring automatic isolation (for example, pods in different virtual clusters cannot communicate by default), vCluster allows for configurable network policies and service sharing, supporting both separation and sharing as needed.

• Node Management:
  Assign static nodes to specific virtual clusters or share node pools among multiple virtual clusters, providing flexibility in resource allocation.

Cost-Effectiveness and Reduced Overhead

• Lightweight Infrastructure:
  Virtual clusters are significantly more lightweight than physical clusters, able to spin up in seconds, which contrasts sharply with the lengthy provisioning times often seen in environments like EKS (~45 minutes).

• Resource Efficiency:
  By sharing the underlying host cluster's resources, virtual clusters minimize the need for additional physical infrastructure, reducing costs and environmental impact.

• Simplified Management:
  The vCluster control plane, running inside a single pod, along with optional integrated CoreDNS, minimizes the operational overhead, making virtual clusters especially suitable for large-scale deployments and multi-tenancy scenarios.

Enhanced Flexibility and Compatibility

• Diverse Kubernetes Environments:
  vCluster supports different Kubernetes versions and distributions (including K8s and K3s), allowing version skews. This makes it possible to tailor each virtual cluster to specific requirements without impacting others.

• Adaptable Backing Stores:
  Choose from a range of data stores, from lightweight (SQLite) to enterprise-grade options (embedded etcd, external data stores like Global RDS), catering to various scalability and durability needs.

• Runs Anywhere:
  Virtual clusters can run on EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, RKE, K3s, cloud, edge, and on-prem. As long as it's a K8s cluster, you can run a virtual cluster on top of it.

Improved Scalability

• Reduced API Server Load:
  Virtual clusters, each with their own dedicated API server, significantly reduce the operational load on the host cluster's Kubernetes API server by isolating and handling requests internally.

• Conflict-Free CRD Management:
  Independent management of CRDs within each virtual cluster eliminates the potential for CRD conflicts and version discrepancies, ensuring smoother operations and easier scaling as the user base expands.

📚 Expand Your Knowledge

Conference Talks

Community Voice

Explore more vCluster tips on our Youtube Channel and Blogs.

💻 Contribute to vCluster

We love contributions! Check out our Contributing Guide.

For quick local development, use

🔗 Useful Links

• Documentation
• Slack Community
• vCluster Website

Adopters

We're glad to see vCluster being adopted by organizations around the world! Below are just a few examples of how vCluster is being used in production environments:

• Atlan: Atlan Reduced Their Infrastructure From 100 Kubernetes Clusters To 1 Using vCluster.
• Adobe: Enhancing development environments with virtual clusters.
• Aussie Broadband: Aussie Broadband Achieved 99% Faster Cluster Provisioning with vCluster.
• Codefresh: Codefresh uses vCluster to provide hosted ArgoCD.
• Coreweave: CoreWeave and Loft Labs Leverage vCluster to Run Virtual Clusters in Kubernetes at Scale.
• Scanmetrics: Scanmetrix Achieved 99% Faster Customer Deployments with vCluster
• Trade Connectors: Trade Connectors Optimized Kubernetes Cost with Multi-Tenancy from vCluster.
• ABBYY
• Aera
• Lintasarta
• Precisely
• Shipwire

Are you using vCluster? We'd love to hear your story! Please open a pull request to add your name here, or contact us.

📜 License

vCluster is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

Copyright

© 2025 Loft Labs. All rights reserved. This project and its maintainers are committed to fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and respectful community.