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by Daniel Thiry
The idea of virtual Kubernetes clusters (vClusters) is to spin up a fully-functional cluster within another Kubernetes cluster to provide an efficient abstraction and direct Kubernetes access on top of a shared underlying cluster.
I have already described the benefits and use cases use of such virtual clusters for development, and specifically for cloud-native development, CI/CD, and ML/AI experimentation. However, since vClusters are similarly flexible as regular Kubernetes clusters and namespaces, they can also be used in many situations apart from development.
In this article, I want to describe some of these production use cases that I believe virtual clusters are most valuable for.
Replacing clusters by vClusters to save cost
Running fewer Kubernetes clusters is generally cheaper because fewer clusters lead to less redundancy and higher utilization. Moreover, they are easier to manage by the cluster admins.
However, people are still not running everything on just one cluster for good reasons. Often, this reason is that you had to run everything in namespaces, which do not provide sufficient isolation in many situations. Compared to namespaces, vClusters improve the isolation of tenants and so…
