DevOps Articles

Introduction to Virtual Clusters in Kubernetes

With the increasing adoption of Kubernetes within organizations, the need for Kubernetes access for applications and engineers is also growing. I will also explain how virtual Kubernetes clusters work, how they can be used, and why they are a real alternative to current approaches for Kubernetes access. The idea of virtualization within Kubernetes is not new: In the official Kubernetes documentation, namespaces are labeled “virtual clusters” that span a single physical cluster and provide a joint scope for related Kubernetes objects.

The basic idea of a virtual cluster is to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster within an existing cluster and sync certain core resources between those two clusters.

With this architecture, virtual clusters improve isolation: Since the virtual cluster is a working Kubernetes cluster itself, it is also even possible to install virtual clusters within virtual clusters.