Darren Shepherd joins Loft Labs Advisory Board
Loft Labs announced that Darren Shepherd has joined the company’s advisory board. Shepherd is the former chief architect at SUSE, the global leader in innovative, reliable, and enterprise-ready open source solutions.
Prior to SUSE, Shepherd was the co-founder and chief technology officer at Rancher Labs, which was acquired by SUSE.
“Darren has always been a good friend to Loft and a great advisor to our CTO,” said Lukas Gentele, co-founder and CEO of Loft Labs. “We are thrilled to gain Darren’s expertise in a more official capacity after having managed an impressive development team at Rancher, along with his knowledge of how to walk the fine line between open source and monetization.”
“This is my first experience joining an advisory board and I could not have picked a better company to advise,” said Shepherd. “From the start, I have been excited by what Loft has been doing and welcome the opportunity to lend my expertise to help the company become what I know it has the potential to be.”
Shepherd helped initiate the vcluster open source project, launched in April 2021. vcluster stepped into the footsteps of an earlier project called k3v, which was a first proof-of-concept for virtualizing Kubernetes based on the popular k3s distribution, also initiated by Shepherd.
The vcluster open source software is growing quickly with more than 500,000 downloads and over 1,300 stars on GitHub in less than a year after its initial release. The vcluster project is used to create lightweight Kubernetes clusters that run inside the namespaces of underlying Kubernetes clusters.
Darren Shepherd joins Abby Kearns, chief technology officer at Puppet, on the Loft advisory board.
Loft Labs builds its enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform Loft on top of vcluster. 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.