Open Source Insider

Loft Labs donates DevSpace to CNCF

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

Developer tooling and multi-tenancy specialist solutions for Kubernetes company Loft Labs has donated the open source project DevSpace to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The CNCF Sandbox will provide a neutral home for the project to receive external contributions from the cloud-native community and to benefit from vendor-independent governance.

Let’s remind ourselves of the facts i.e. the CNCF hosts (what are widely agreed to be) critical components of the planet#s global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes.

Because (by its own admission) it is focused on building sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, there are over 50 developer tools available for Kubernetes. 

But, until now, only one of them was in the CNCF Sandbox. 

kube-context

DevSpace is a lightweight client-only command-line interface (CLI) tool that employs users’ current kube-context, like kubectl or Helm. It does not require installing anything inside a cluster and is versatile with the ability to work on top of any Kubernetes cluster without modification.

Today, there are hundreds of organisations that use DevSpace to enhance developer velocity and build their cloud-native applications with over one million installations and more than 3,200 GitHub stars for the project.

“By contributing DevSpace to the CNCF, we’re hoping to contribute to the CNCF’s goal of making cloud native ubiquitous by adding new options for Kubernetes developer tooling to the ecosystem while enabling the DevSpace project to grow in the Sandbox via the CNCF’s stewardship and support,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs. “We want to remain a main contributor going forward and will heavily invest in the technology, but the governance should be safely transitioned to the Linux Foundation and the community now that DevSpace is mature enough for this step.” 

There is more on the rationale behind the decision in this article, Why Loft Labs Is Donating DevSpace to CNCF.

While other solutions rely on complex network proxying to mimic fast in-cluster development, DevSpace focuses on providing a simple lightweight execution model through a client-side binary. 

Hot re-loads

Since code changes are hot-reloaded into running containers, this allows developers to use the cloud to run all the workflows and see changes to their applications immediately reflected in the running containers without the need for image building or recreating and rescheduling containers. This relieves computing power from their local workstations and better utilizes the cloud for what it is built for — running workloads.

Loft Labs builds its enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform Loft on top of the open source vcluster project. Loft is used by large organisations to create a self-service platform for their engineering teams. 

When an enterprise runs Loft, their engineers can provision virtual clusters on-demand whenever they need them, either using the Loft UI (user interface), the Loft CLI (command-line interface) or even using the Kubernetes command-line tool kubectl via the custom resources provided as part of Loft.

CNCF Sandbox – 4 core goals

  1. Encourage public visibility of experiments or other early work that can add value to the CNCF mission and build the ingredients of a successful Incubation-level project.
  2. Facilitate alignment with existing projects if (and only if) this is desired.
  3. Nurture projects (e.g., via CNCF Service Desk requests).
  4. Remove possible legal and governance obstacles to adoption and contribution by ensuring all projects adhere to CNCF legal, code of conduct and IP policy requirements.