How Atlan Reduced Their Infrastructure From 100 Kubernetes Clusters To 1 Using vCluster

100 EKS Clusters For 100 Customers

95% of our customers trust us to host our Atlan platform for them in the cloud as managed product. Because many of our customers are in healthcare, finance, and other critical sectors, we need to place a heavy premium on ensuring the highest level of data privacy, which means keeping each customer’s data secure and strictly isolated from another.

Due to these high privacy requirements, we initially created one full-blown EKS cluster for each individual customer. Soon we had more than 100 clusters to manage and it became a massive burden. Although we had built our own tooling around CloudFormation, this homegrown toolchain had several drawbacks.

Drawbacks

• The cost of running 100+ EKS clusters 24x7 was very high
• Building our own homegrown tooling was very time-consuming and maintenance was hard
• A multi-cloud strategy was out of reach for our homegrown tooling

20 EKS Clusters For 100+ Customers

We decided to research multi-tenancy options for EKS, which led us immediately to vCluster. We started intensively evaluating vCluster in Q1 2022 and became a customer a few months later. We could see the product evolve very quickly and the vCluster team was very responsive to feature requests, which is very important for us to go all-in on their product for our production use case.

With our new multi-tenant EKS architecture based on vCluster, we can now spin up one lightweight virtual cluster per customer instead of having to spin up one heavyweight EKS cluster per customer, which has many advantages:

Advantages

• Multi-Tenancy with vCluster drastically reduces cost due to needing fewer physical clusters.
• vCluster provides rock-solid tooling for managing virtual clusters at scale that we can rely on.
• We can manage virtual clusters across different clusters and even across cloud platforms using vCluster.

vCluster Support Is Competent And Fast

Whenever we’ve had questions about vCluster or how to design our multi-tenant platform, the Loft team has been very helpful and incredibly fast: We always got answers within hours, and often within minutes.

The part we like the most about vCluster’s support offering is that we don’t have to open a ticket. Because besides the regular email support, vCluster also offers support via Slack Connect. That means we have a private Slack channel visible directly in our own Slack workspace and if we have any questions, we just chat with their support engineers.

This makes reporting issues faster and allows for a faster back-and-forth via Slack when collaborative debugging is required to get to the bottom of an issue.