vCluster

Cluster API is an open-source Kubernetes subproject focused on declarative APIs and tooling for provisioning, upgrading, and operating multiple Kubernetes clusters. Developed by the Kubernetes SIG Cluster Lifecycle, it uses Kubernetes-style APIs and patterns to define cluster configuration and supporting infrastructure—including virtual machines, networks, load balancers, and VPCs—for consistent, repeatable deployments. Providers extend it to infrastructure platforms such as AWS, Azure, and vSphere, while kubeadm is provided as a built-in bootstrap and control-plane provider.

ZSvirt is an open-source virtualization and IaaS platform backed by ZStack. Its management plane coordinates KVM-based hosts, clusters, virtual machines, images, networks, storage, volumes, snapshots, permissions, events, alarms, auditing, and lifecycle operations. Environments can be managed through a web interface, RESTful API, Terraform and Go/Python/Java SDKs, or a CLI. The platform uses asynchronous, stateless services, plugin-based extensibility, a workflow engine with rollback and recovery, resource tagging and queries, and automated deployment tooling. It also includes VMware migration features such as online migration, OVF import, and VMDK upload, and can be run from a qcow2 or OVA management-node image on VMware, VirtualBox, KVM, or a cloud host.

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.

A VMware Kubernetes distribution for deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters on VMware infrastructure, including VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere environments. It provides a VMware-integrated Kubernetes runtime for organizations operating workloads on the VMware platform.

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.