Loft Labs Donates Open Source Project DevSpace to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Loft Labs, provider of developer tooling and multi-tenancy solutions for Kubernetes, today announced that it has donated the open source project DevSpace to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software. 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.

The CNCF hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, and is focused on building sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software. There are over 50 developer tools available for Kubernetes. Until now, only one of them was in the CNCF Sandbox. DevSpace is a lightweight, easy-to-use 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 organizations 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 the lightning fast in-cluster development, DevSpace focuses on providing a simple lightweight execution model through a client-side binary. 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.

“We need to pay more attention to developer-oriented tools and this one [DevSpace] seems like it’s in a good space for that,” said Davanum Srinivas, part of CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC). Adding to that, Emily Fox, also member of CNCF’s TOC, said, “With the right level of visibility and community support this could really take off within the community and ecosystem.”

Loft Labs builds its enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform Loft on top of the open source vcluster project. Loft is used by large organizations 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.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

About Loft Labs
Loft Labs was founded in 2019 to create open-source developer tooling and virtual cluster technology for Kubernetes, with the goal to increase developer productivity and to help engineers gain secure but unimpeded access to cloud infrastructure.