Kubermatic KubeLB

What is KubeLB?

KubeLB is a project by Kubermatic, it is a Kubernetes native tool, responsible for centrally managing Layer 4 and 7 load balancing configurations for Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud and on-premise environments.

Motivation and Background

Kubernetes does not offer any implementation for load balancers and in turn relies on the in-tree or out-of-tree cloud provider implementations to take care of provisioning and managing load balancers. This means that if you are not running on a supported cloud provider, your services of type LoadBalancer will never be allotted a load balancer IP address. This is an obstacle for bare-metal Kubernetes environments.

There are solutions available like MetalLB, Cilium, etc. that solve this issue. However, these solutions are focused on a single cluster where you have to deploy the application in the same cluster where you want the load balancers. This is not ideal for multi-cluster environments since you have to configure load balancing for each cluster separately, which makes IP address management not trivial.

For application load balancing, we have the same case where an external application like nginx-ingress, envoy gateway, needs to be deployed in the cluster. To further secure traffic, additional tools are required for managing DNS, TLS certificates, Web Application Firewall, etc.

KubeLB solves this problem by providing a centralized management solution that can manage the data plane for multiple Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud and on-premise environments. This enables you to manage fleet of Kubernetes clusters in a centralized way, ensuring security compliance, enforcing policies, and providing a consistent experience for developers.

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Further Information

Visit kubermatic.com for further information.

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