Everyone knows that using a Kubernetes Load Balancer is a challenge. Back in the day when I was responsible for network operations, the load balancer management was under my team’s responsibility too. By Alex Saroyan.
Public cloud providers offer a great deal of convenience by automatically provisioning and configuring the services needed by the application.
All major public cloud providers offer on-demand load balancer services that you use for exposing your Kubernetes applications to the public Internet. Or you are using an Ingress controller and your Ingress controller is using the on-demand load balancer for exposing it’s public TCP port towards the Internet.
In the article you will learn:
- What user experience are cloud practitioners expecting from Layer-4 load balancers?
- How can we get this cloud-like experience in a private cloud, on-prem?
- Where is the most practical place for the Layer-4 load balancer function in my architecture?
- Why are network gateways great places for Layer-4 load balancing functions?
- What are the options (suitable for Kubernetes)?
- Practical, cloud-like network gateway with native Kubernetes integration
Linux machine + optionally DPDK / SmartNIC acceleration can make a great network gateway with Layer-4 load balancer and native integration with Kubernetes. Almost any common Linux distribution has the minimum building blocks i.e. Layer-2, Layer-3, Layer-4 network functionality. Good read!
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