Accelerating CI Pipelines: Rapid Kubernetes Testing with vCluster

Abstract

Kubernetes-aware integration tests are slow because spinning up a real cluster per pipeline is slow. This FOSDEM session shows how teams are replacing kind/minikube and per-team dev clusters with vCluster — tenant clusters that boot in seconds inside an existing Kubernetes control plane cluster. We walk through the GitHub Actions and Argo Workflows patterns that make per-PR clusters practical, the trade-offs versus shared dev environments, and where the approach breaks down.