vcluster VS porter

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/)

This is just a concept. AFAIK only one implemented this concept is Microsoft's project porter: https://github.com/getporter/porter

For porter I am talking about this project https://porter.run/ and NOT this https://porter.sh/

Porter

As far as I know the tool is used at least in Microsoft. The classic use case is where you want to install an application and also define the infrastructure as well (i.e cluster + db + lb + app). You can see the examples here https://github.com/getporter/porter/tree/main/examples

Check https://cnab.io/ and https://porter.sh/

I'm closely tracking an effort by Microsoft that aims to do a lot of what you're describing since I find myself bridging between these tools and deploying stacks that span tools and roles. [CNAB](https://cnab.io/) and the front-running implementation, [Porter](https://porter.sh/), enable one-step infra deployments, packaged as a single OCI-compatible container, with any number of steps, using the best tools for each of those steps. Think of using aws-cli for some initialization step (create or verify presence of a state bucket), applying some terraform to create infra, and finishing with a helm chart to complete deployment of app components. Each stage in a bundle packages not only the code to run it but also the execution binary of the tool that runs it. The spec and porter are still a moving target but it's a promising space and a nice adjacent evolution of the current state of tooling.

Cool, it's great to know that it isn't abandoned.

I'm not sure why you'd say that their business model was a success. They were bought by Microsoft for Azure. I guess I wonder if a PaaS company can survive without getting the profits off renting the machines to people. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have PaaS options based around the idea that it comes bundled with the compute, not as a standalone open-source thing for you to use on any platform.

I guess the question is whether Porter's business plan is "make enough that a company that owns a cloud wants to buy us". Oracle could probably use a nice PaaS platform and team. Maybe DigitalOcean would like to beef up their PaaS offering by acqui-hiring a team with proven knowledge.

Poking around https://deislabs.io, it's interesting to see that they have a project called "Porter" which seems to be unrelated to the "Porter" being launched here: https://porter.sh. They aren't quite the same, but they both have "easily run your app" goals.

There is already this from Microsoft https://github.com/getporter/porter