On a rainy Monday morning the new Team Lead requested test environments for their latest proof of concepts.

While searching for a solution to provide teams with short lived environments, we have looked at several solutions, from namespaces on a shared cluster, all the way to fully fledged Terraform managed environments.

While we can provision Kubernetes clusters for all our teams, our current setup does not make that easy. As the Platform Team we like to keep our focus on operating the primary systems and not drown in requests for new environments.

In this talk I'll show how we finally solved these requests from our teams by utilising the Loft vCluster project to give freedom to dev teams while not breaking the bank with hundreds of clusters.