When you deploy Kubernetes Cluster in a Public Cloud environment, the network load balancers are available on-demand. The same is not true for clusters deployed in private cloud environment or any kind of on-prem Infrastructure. In this kind of setups it’s the responsibility of System Administrators / Network Engineers to integrate Kubernetes Cluster with any Load balancer(s) in place.

A Load balancer is responsible for the provision of a single IP address to route incoming requests to the application. For you to successfully create Kubernetes services of type LoadBalancer, a load balancer implementation available for Kubernetes is required.

Since Bare-metal environments lack Load Balancers by default, Services of type LoadBalancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created. In this article we’ll perform an installation of MetalLB Load Balancer on Kubernetes Cluster to offer the same kind of access to external consumers. Commonly used tools in Bare-metal Kubernetes clusters to bring user traffic in are “NodePort” and “externalIPs“.

What is MetalLB?

MetalLB is a pure software solution that provides a network load-balancer implementation for Kubernetes clusters that are not deployed in supported cloud provider using standard routing protocols. By installing MetalLB solution, you effectively get LoadBalancer Services within your Kubernetes cluster.

MetalLB have the following requirement to function: