vcluster VS hierarchical-namespaces

Compare vcluster vs hierarchical-namespaces and see what are their differences.

vcluster

vCluster - Create fully functional virtual Kubernetes clusters - Each vcluster runs inside a namespace of the underlying k8s cluster. It's cheaper than creating separate full-blown clusters and it offers better multi-tenancy and isolation than regular namespaces. (by loft-sh)

hierarchical-namespaces

Home of the Hierarchical Namespace Controller (HNC). Adds hierarchical policies and delegated creation to Kubernetes namespaces for improved in-cluster multitenancy. (by kubernetes-sigs)
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vcluster hierarchical-namespaces
70 8
5,577 581
12.0% 7.4%
9.7 6.6
4 days ago 8 days ago
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Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

vcluster

Posts with mentions or reviews of vcluster. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-27.
  • Amazon EC2 Enhances Defense in Depth with Default IMDSv2
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Nov 2023
    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/

  • Mirantis Unveils K0smotron: An Open-Source Kubernetes Management Project
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2023
    Whats the difference between this and vcluster (https://github.com/loft-sh/vcluster)?
  • Codespaces but open-source, client-only, and unopinionated
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jun 2023
    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

  • Anyone using Kata Containers?
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 23 Apr 2023
    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
  • Multi-tenancy in Kubernetes
    13 projects | dev.to | 10 Apr 2023
    Vcluster
  • Kub'rin' a breeze: Developing on ephemeral cloud-based K8s clusters
    2 projects | /r/kubernetes | 5 Apr 2023
    Looks interesting. How does this solution compare to vcluster?
  • Same cluster for different development environments
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 20 Mar 2023
    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.
  • Is it a good idea to use k8s namespace-based multitenancy for delivering managed service of an application?
    4 projects | /r/kubernetes | 18 Mar 2023
    We're about to run a PoC with vcluster for isolated sandboxes, this might be relevant to you too
  • Questions for Heroku-like Project
    6 projects | /r/kubernetes | 12 Mar 2023
    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)
  • Multiple Tenancy, Namespaces, Securing Workloads
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 24 Feb 2023
    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/)

hierarchical-namespaces

Posts with mentions or reviews of hierarchical-namespaces. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-27.
  • Efficient Cluster Management with Kubernetes’ Hierarchical Namespaces
    1 project | dev.to | 23 Mar 2024
    HNC_VERSION=v1.1.0 HNC_VARIANT=default kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces/releases/latest/download/hnc-manager.yaml
  • Amazon EC2 Enhances Defense in Depth with Default IMDSv2
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Nov 2023
    Kubernetes has a lot of limitations from a multi tenancy perspective.

    It's functional, but I think it's not as polished as the rest of Kubernetes which is why Kubernetes has a multi tenancy SIG that spawned the hierarchical namespace controller (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces) and virtual clusters (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-nest...)

  • Automatically deploy objects after namespace creation
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 31 May 2023
    Kyverno's a great option. Depending on the usecase you might want to consider https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces as well (disclaimer: I'm the original author) - it's good if groups of related namespaces need related objects.
  • Multitenancy with Hierarchical namespaces
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Jun 2022
    ❯ HNC_VERSION=v1.0.0 ❯ kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces/releases/download/${HNC_VERSION}/default.yaml namespace/hnc-system created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/hierarchyconfigurations.hnc.x-k8s.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/hncconfigurations.hnc.x-k8s.io created customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/subnamespaceanchors.hnc.x-k8s.io created role.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-leader-election-role created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-admin-role created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-manager-role created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-proxy-role created rolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-leader-election-rolebinding created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-manager-rolebinding created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/hnc-proxy-rolebinding created secret/hnc-webhook-server-cert created service/hnc-controller-manager-metrics-service created service/hnc-webhook-service created deployment.apps/hnc-controller-manager created mutatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/hnc-mutating-webhook-configuration created validatingwebhookconfiguration.admissionregistration.k8s.io/hnc-validating-webhook-configuration created # Install helper plugin ❯ kubectl krew install hns
  • Is it anti-pattern to have multiple environments under a single namespace?
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 13 Apr 2022
    I would say it’s an anti-pattern since using a namespace for multiple environments will be a pain. Not sure what you mean by CRDs though. There is an addon that gives you namespace hierarchies. I.e. each team gets a namespace and they can have sub-namespaces for environments. Check it out: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces
  • Ask r/kubernetes: What are you working on this week?
    1 project | /r/kubernetes | 2 Feb 2022
    Looking into the Hierarchical Namespace Controller to see if it can simplify our heavily multi-tenanted clusters. So far so good!
  • RBAC and limited namespace access
    2 projects | /r/kubernetes | 19 Dec 2021
    HNC is designed for these kinds of scenarios: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/hierarchical-namespaces
  • Introduction to Multi-Tenancy in Kubernetes
    3 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2021
    Project HNC

What are some alternatives?

When comparing vcluster and hierarchical-namespaces you can also consider the following projects:

capsule - Multi-tenancy and policy-based framework for Kubernetes.

kind - Kubernetes IN Docker - local clusters for testing Kubernetes

rbac-manager - A Kubernetes operator that simplifies the management of Role Bindings and Service Accounts.

kiosk - kiosk 🏢 Multi-Tenancy Extension For Kubernetes - Secure Cluster Sharing & Self-Service Namespace Provisioning

namespace-configuration-operator - The namespace-configuration-operator helps keeping configurations related to Users, Groups and Namespaces aligned with one of more policies specified as a CRs

cluster-api-provider-nested - Cluster API Provider for Nested Clusters

k3s - Lightweight Kubernetes

multi-tenancy - A working place for multi-tenancy related proposals and prototypes.

kubeplus - Kubernetes Operator to create multi-instance SaaS from Helm charts using Kubernetes-native APIs

secrets-store-csi-driver - Secrets Store CSI driver for Kubernetes secrets - Integrates secrets stores with Kubernetes via a CSI volume.