Working with Load Balancers

Selecting a Load Balancer Solution

Kubernetes comes with a basic load balancer solution internally, but Kubernetes does not directly offer an external load balancing component. You must provide one, or you can integrate your Kubernetes cluster with a cloud provider. In a Kubernetes cluster, depending on the flow of traffic direction, there are two kinds of load balancing:

Internal load balancing for the traffic within a Kubernetes cluster
External load balancing for the traffic coming from outside the cluster

External Load Balancers

DKP includes a load balancing solution for the supported cloud infrastructure providers and for pre-provisioned environments. For more information, see Load Balancing for external traffic in DKP.

If you want to use a non-DKP load balancer (for example, as an alternative to MetalLB in pre-provisioned environments), DKP supports setting up an external load balancer.

When enabled, the external load balancer routes incoming traffic requests to a single point of entry in your cluster. Users and services can then access the DKP UI through an established IP or DNS address.

Select your Connection Mechanism

A virtual IP is the address that the client uses to connect to the service. A load balancer is the device that distributes the client connections to the backend servers. Before you create a new DKP cluster, choose an external load balancer(LB) or virtual IP.

External load balancer

It is recommended that an external load balancer be the control plane endpoint. To distribute request load among the control plane machines, configure the load balancer to send requests to all the control plane machines. Configure the load balancer to send requests only to control plane machines that are responding to API requests.

Built-in virtual IP (option for Pre-provisioned or vSphere)

If an external load balancer is not available, use the built-in virtual IP. The virtual IP is not a load balancer; it does not distribute request load among the control plane machines. However, if the machine receiving requests does not respond to them, the virtual IP automatically moves to another machine.

External Load Balancer for the DKP Kommander Component

If you want to use a non-DKP load balancer (for example, as an alternative to MetalLB in pre-provisioned environments), DKP supports setting up an external load balancer.

When enabled, the external load balancer routes incoming traffic requests to a single point of entry in your cluster. Users and services can then access the DKP UI through an established IP or DNS address. Refer to External Load Balancer page of documentation for further details.

For MetalLB, refer to the page: Pre-provisioned Configure MetalLB

Next Topics

If Load Balancer does not apply, proceed to any of the next topics: