Loft Saves Resources

On the one hand, companies do not need to spend large amounts of money on hardware; on the other hand, the additional features save resources. At your request, Loft can put currently unused virtual Kubernetes clusters into a kind of sleep until they are needed again, without your explicit intervention. This feature is obviously aimed at companies where developers only need their Kubernetes environments for testing on an irregular basis. In practice, switching off instances that are not needed at the moment means that tests can be planned and executed more efficiently with the same hardware.

Other Amenities

Loft extends Kubernetes with a kind of tenant capability that cannot even be approached with the original. But that is obviously not enough for the creators of the solution, so they draw on the gamut of features that scalable software should have today.

For example, if you want to know what the resource usage caused by Loft looks like in the target clusters, you can roll out the Prometheus that is integrated in Loft with a few commands from the command line. The time series database benefits because Loft itself provides various metrics in Prometheus-compatible format. The services mesh natively (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The Loft developers have also thought of interfaces for state-of-the-art monitoring systems such as Prometheus. ©Loft

Different Versions

Loft is not open source software but a proprietary product. Parts of the solution can be found under an open license on GitHub, but anyone who wants to use the solution on a large scale will have to purchase the licenses from the manufacturer. The Free version comes without a price tag but only allows the use of three user accounts. It can connect a maximum of two Kubernetes clusters and roll out five virtual clusters. The Productive variant costs $20 per user per month, supports up to 200 users, and can connect 10 Kubernetes clusters and create any number of virtual clusters. If you need the larger package and features such as high availability, you can purchase the Enterprise license for $47 per user per month.