Virtual Kubernetes Clusters: A New Approach to Multi-tenancy

Abstract

Tenant isolation on Kubernetes is a long-running tax: every team gets either their own cluster (expensive, slow to provision) or a slice of a shared one (noisy, leaky abstractions). This SREday session walks through tenant clusters built on vCluster — each tenant gets its own API server and control plane while sharing the underlying nodes — and shows how the approach changes the operational picture for SREs. Topics include resource sharing, network isolation, upgrade choreography, and how to think about blast radius when control planes are themselves workloads.