Cluster API

vCluster is a Kubernetes tenant-cluster platform developed by Loft. It creates isolated virtual Kubernetes environments on top of an existing control-plane cluster or on dedicated infrastructure and bare metal; each tenant cluster has its own API server, custom resource definitions, and role-based access control, providing a cluster experience intended to resemble dedicated Kubernetes. vCluster can be installed and operated through its CLI and kubectl, and also supports running locally through its Docker driver. The project is a CNCF Certified Kubernetes distribution and is positioned for multi-tenancy, managed Kubernetes, and AI infrastructure workloads.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It manages containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and scheduling workloads. Applications can be configured with YAML and deployed across hybrid-cloud environments; the platform is also used for production operations involving storage, databases, networking, and security hardening.

Cast AI is a Kubernetes optimization platform for cloud-native teams. It uses workload, infrastructure, cost, and SLO signals to automate actions such as pod rightsizing, node scaling, GPU and Spot optimization, workload replica and resource tuning, bin packing, and operational remediation with approval workflows. The platform connects to EKS, AKS, GKE, and on-premises clusters without requiring cluster changes. The videos also identify Cast AI as the company that created Kimchi, an open-source coding harness with tools for autonomous coding tasks, persistent agent sessions, and team collaboration.

KCL is an open-source, constraint-based record and functional language for generating and managing configuration, including cloud-native and Kubernetes resources. It uses schemas, static types, constraints, rules, and isolated configuration blocks to model, validate, mutate, and organize configuration while reducing boilerplate; it can generate JSON and YAML or integrate with existing data. KCL supports configuration tooling such as formatting, linting, testing, documentation, package management, IDE extensions, and SDKs for several languages, and integrates with Kubernetes through tools including the Kubectl, Kustomize, Helm, and Crossplane KCL plugins. In Crossplane workflows, it can be used to develop composition functions as independent executable source code before embedding them into YAML at build time. The project is a CNCF Sandbox project and its implementation uses Rust and C, with support for native-code and WebAssembly compilation.

Crossplane is a Kubernetes-native, CNCF project for building cloud-native control planes without writing a custom control-plane implementation. Its extensible backend orchestrates applications and infrastructure across environments through declarative APIs, while its configurable frontend lets platform teams define schemas for internal infrastructure abstractions. It manages provider-backed managed resources (MRs), composite resources (XRs), and Compositions that package collections of infrastructure resources behind simpler interfaces. Kubernetes reconciliation continuously works toward the declared state through provider APIs, and custom functions can be developed as reusable building blocks within compositions.