devspace-plugin-loft VS vcluster

I'm biased but I do think what you're describing is a good use case for Kubernetes. I work for Loft Labs, we're the company that created vcluster. We do have a commercial product called Loft that lets you manage vclusters and offer them self-service to developers. If you want to get more info on that, the web site is loft.sh.

There are some products available, for example Loft who open sourced vcluster

We run on EKS and use https://loft.sh/ to deploy development environments. The engineer runs the single service locally that they want to modify. Any other services or databases that service connects to run remotely in our Development EKS cluster using Loft and port forwards to the engineers local environment.

Lastly, one day my employer will let my run Loft so that I can provide on-demand ephemeral k8s clusters to my dev + test teams.

Have a look at https://github.com/loft-sh/kiosk and maybe the paid version https://loft.sh/

How many friends? I would recommend evaluating Loft which is free for up to 3 users.

Automate the setup of new k8s environments, ideally they should be ephemeral, disposed regularly and rebuilt by the devs themselves, on demand. This will also keep costs in check, devs don't work 24/7 so why should their cloud infrastructure? A tool worth checking would be Loft

Loft solves this + much more. There are cost-saving features too, so it might actually pay for itself. Don't hesitate to book a demo.

Loft.sh provides self-serve Kubernetes solutions for cost optimization, CI/CD, policy enforcement, user management, collaboration, and more. It helps save on Kubernetes costs by using quotas and space constraints which helps while sharing your clusters among multiple users and teams. Auto delete for idle namespaces and sleep mode for idle workloads also saves costs.

Kubernetes? You mean the container orchestration system where they forgot to add Multi-tenancy? And no namespaces are not Multi-tenancy...

https://www.vcluster.com/

Whats the difference between this and vcluster (https://github.com/loft-sh/vcluster)?

Yep, as we see it they compliment each other quite well. DevPod takes your workspace to the cloud and DevSpace let's you develop against your Kubernetes cluster - potentially the same one you used to start your workspace.

Internally we use both in our development setup, spinning up remote workspaces using DevPod, installing DevSpace and kind into the devcontainer, then using DevSpace to develop against the cluster. See the vcluster setup[1] as an example

[1]https://github.com/loft-sh/vcluster/tree/main/.devcontainer

The tenants are internal dev teams so yeah maybe not. I was considering multi-tenanting different environments isolated at the kube layer with vCluster and have the vCluster pods running in Kata containers giving maximum isolation but still having a single management cluster. Ideally also avoiding the need to buy a second set of hardware for a dev environment

Vcluster

Looks interesting. How does this solution compare to vcluster?

sounds like the best option for you , is a tool called VCluster by loft ( https://www.vcluster.com/) , this way you can install as many k8s cluster as you want in the same k8s host cluster , those cluster share workers nodes and networking, but each has a separated "api server" , so it looks like you have a dedicated cluster with their own namespaces and tools . take a look at the docs to get a better understanding and how they work.

We're about to run a PoC with vcluster for isolated sandboxes, this might be relevant to you too

I think namespaces, RBAC and network policies are sufficient to partition users from the same organisation. I would investigate the use of vcluster ig you want to give your users even more isolation and capability (such as installing CRDs)

Depends on the use case. Namespaces provides soft isolation (so it means they share same Apiserver, PV's and global resources such as CRD's), but can be restricted with network policies. So it means, there's still potential in breaking other namespaces if you change PV's or CRD's which are used by other namespaces. Multi-Cluster solution can provide full isolation, but its also really expensive in resource consumption and maintenance/management effort. If namespaced-isolation isnt enough for your use case, you can consider vclusters (https://www.vcluster.com/)