vcluster-sdk VS devspace-plugin-loft

Plugins: With the complexity of Kubernetes, it became clear that people would need the ability to customize and extend vcluster to fit their workflows. Enter vcluster plugins and the vcluster SDK. Plugins are written in Go and allow users to customize the behavior of vcluster’s syncer to do all kinds of things, like sharing resources between host and virtual clusters. (Docs)

The vcluster project maintainers have created an SDK for writing plugins that abstract a lot of the syncer complexity away from the user, but still provides access to the underlying data structures if needed. Internally, the vcluster SDK uses the popular controller-runtime project, that is used by vcluster itself to create the controllers. The vcluster SDK makes it possible to write custom plugins with just a few lines of code.

So in version 0.6.0 of vcluster, we’ve added the ability for users to write vcluster plugins using the new vcluster SDK. vcluster plugins are written in Go, and they can customize vcluster in many ways. There are currently three examples in the GitHub repo:

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.