Cutting Kubernetes costs with virtual clusters

And yet each vCluster has its own API server and control plane, providing strong isolation to tenants and giving platform teams the ability to create their own custom policies for security and governance. They can create their own namespaces, deploy their own custom resources, protect cluster data by using their own backing stores, and apply their own access control policies to users.

At the same time, vCluster gives platform teams far greater speed and agility than a physical cluster. A virtual cluster can be spun up in a mere fraction of the time it takes to spin up a physical cluster. A restart of a vCluster takes about six seconds, versus 30 or 45 minutes to restart a physical Kubernetes cluster that’s running heavyweight platform services like Istio underneath.

“Kubernetes is great from an API perspective, a tooling perspective, a standardization perspective—but the architecture that the cloud providers advocated in running clusters of small clusters took the industry back to the physical server in terms of cost and heaviness,” Gentele said. “In the ’90s, someone had to actually physically walk into a data center, plug in a server, issue credentials, and take some other manual steps,” he said. “We’re in a similar boat with Kubernetes today. You have so many enterprises running their entire application stack in each cluster, which creates a lot of duplication.”