vCluster Platform v4.3 brings powerful new capabilities across scalability, cost efficiency, and user experience—making it easier than ever to run, manage, and optimize virtual clusters at scale.

External Database Connector - Support for Postgres and Aurora and UI support

Virtual clusters always require a backing store. If you explore vCluster with the default settings and in the most lightweight form possible, your virtual clusters’ data is stored in a SQLite database which is a single-file database that is typically stored in a persistent volume mounted into your vCluster pod. However, for users that want more scalable and resilient backing stores, vCluster also supports:

• etcd (deployed outside of your virtual cluster and self-managed)

• Embedded etcd (runs an etcd cluster as part of your virtual cluster pods fully managed by vCluster)

• External databases (MySQL or Postgres databases)

• External database connector (MySQL or Postgres database servers including Amazon Aurora

In v4.1, we introduced the External Database Connector feature with only MySQL support, but now we’ve extended support for Postgres database servers. We have also introduced a UI flow to manage your database connectors and select them directly when creating virtual clusters.

If you want to learn more about External Database Connectors, view the documentation.

UI Updates

There have been major refreshes in different parts of our UI to help the user experience. The navigation has been updated to quickly find project settings and secrets, but to also allow customization of the colors of the platform.

Permission Management

Admins can now take advantage of the new permission page to easily view in one source all the permissions granted to the user or team. From this view, it’s also easy to add or edit permissions in one central location.

In addition to the new permission page, the pages to create and edit users, teams and global roles have all been updated to improve the experience of creating those objects.

New Pages for vCluster and vCluster Templates

Creating virtual clusters or virtual cluster templates from the platform has always been critical in quick and easy virtual cluster creation. With vCluster v0.20, the vcluster.yaml has become the main configuration file and in vCluster Platform we have introduced an easy way to edit the file as well as use UI to populate/create the file.

Cost Control

In v4.2, we introduced a cost savings dashboard. In this release, the metrics and queries collection were re-formatted for better performance and maintenance. Note: with these changes, all metrics collection will be reset upon upgrading.

Sleep Mode Support for vCluster v0.24+

In vCluster v0.24, we introduced the ability to sleep virtual clusters directly in the vcluster.yaml. In previous versions of the platform, that feature of vCluster was not compatible with the platform and those values were not accounted. Now, when a virtual cluster is using sleep mode, the platform will read the configuration and if the agent is deployed on the host cluster, it takes over managing sleep mode as if it had been configured for the platform.

For a list of additional fixes and smaller changes, please refer to the release notes.