Use Case
Kubernetes Multi-Tenancy for SaaS
Your customers need isolated Kubernetes environments. Running a dedicated cluster per customer is the gold standard for isolation but it doesn't scale — 500 customers means 500 API servers, 500 etcd instances, and 500 sets of controllers. The infrastructure tax alone runs $25K-100K/mo before a single workload is scheduled.
Namespace isolation is cheap but isn't real isolation. Customers share CRDs, admission webhooks, and cluster-scoped resources. One customer's misconfiguration can affect everyone.
kplane gives each customer a fully isolated Kubernetes control plane on shared infrastructure. Full isolation. ~3 MB per customer instead of ~512 MB.
The math
500 customers on dedicated clusters
~256 GB RAM
for control planes alone (512 MB x 500)
500 customers on kplane
~1.5 GB RAM
for control planes (3 MB x 500)
Same isolation guarantees. Independent RBAC, CRDs, namespaces, and admission policies per customer. 170x less infrastructure for the control plane layer.
Onboarding
Customer signup → API call to create control plane → kubeconfig returned in ~2 seconds. No Terraform runs, no cluster provisioning pipelines, no waiting for node pools to come up.
Offboarding
Delete the control plane. Resources are cleaned up. The node infrastructure is reclaimed immediately.