MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols.
Why?
Kubernetes does not offer an implementation of network load-balancers (Services of type LoadBalancer) for bare metal clusters. The implementations of Network LB that Kubernetes does ship with are all glue code that calls out to various IaaS platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure…). If you’re not running on a supported IaaS platform (GCP, AWS, Azure…), LoadBalancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created.
Bare metal cluster operators are left with two lesser tools to bring user traffic into their clusters, “NodePort” and “externalIPs” services. Both of these options have significant downsides for production use, which makes bare metal clusters second class citizens in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
MetalLB aims to redress this imbalance by offering a Network LB implementation that integrates with standard network equipment, so that external services on bare metal clusters also “just work” as much as possible.
If you have questions, join us on the kubernetes slack, channel #kubespray.
- Can be deployed on AWS, GCE, Azure, OpenStack, vSphere, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Experimental), or Baremetal
- Highly available cluster
- Composable (Choice of the network plugin for instance)
- Supports most popular Linux distributions
- Continuous integration tests