Kubecon EU 2023 Recap - Canadian CNCF Meetup Organizers

Come join our Canadian CNCF Meetup Organizers for their recap and highlights of Kubecon EU 2023.

Virtual Cluster Tips & Tricks - Rich Burroughs, Staff Developer Advocate and Carl Montanari, Solutions Engineer at Loft Labs

A lot of interest in virtual Kubernetes clusters and the open source tool vcluster has developed over the last year. vcluster allows platform teams to provide virtual Kubernetes clusters to their users. A virtual cluster appears to be a full-blown Kubernetes cluster to the users, but it runs within a namespace of the host cluster. This allows users to have admin access to the cluster, use multiple namespaces in it, and manage global objects like CRDs.

During the last year many new features have been added to vcluster, and we’ve seen it used for use cases that we hadn’t even imagined. In this talk we’ll provide some tips and tricks to help teams get more from their virtual clusters, and a few weird things you can do with them. Some things we’ll cover: How to share resources like ingresses from the host cluster, using vcluster’s isolated mode to automatically add network policies and Pod Security Standards to your virtual clusters, pausing and resuming virtual clusters, and monitoring and backing up virtual clusters. We’ll also cover some fun examples like using vcluster for shadow IT (users don’t need to have elevated privileges in the host cluster to start a virtual cluster) and running a virtual cluster inside of a virtual cluster.