Setup MetalLB for Kubernetes

This post is more like a note to myself, but this may help if you are looking at How to Setup MetalLB for Kubernetes.

Introduction

MetalLB hooks into your Kubernetes cluster, and provides a network load-balancer implementation. In short, it allows you to create Kubernetes services of type LoadBalancer in clusters that don’t run on a cloud provider, and thus cannot simply hook into paid products to provide load balancers.

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…), Load Balancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created.

Kubernetes Env

Setup MetalLB

Install MetalLB and Spesify Address to use as LoadBalancer

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.13.7/config/manifests/metallb-native.yaml

cat<<EOF >> configmap.yaml
apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: IPAddressPool
metadata:
  name: first-pool
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  addresses:
  - 10.20.12.155-10.20.12.170
EOF

kubectl apply -f configmap.yaml

Verify Installation

kubectl get all -n metallb-system

Operational Test

kubectl create deployment nginx --image nginx:alpine
kubectl expose deployment nginx --type LoadBalancer --port 80
kubectl get svc

NAME                 TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)        AGE
service/kubernetes   ClusterIP      10.233.0.1      <none>         443/TCP        23d
service/nginx        LoadBalancer   10.233.59.192   10.20.12.164   80:32061/TCP   3s

Reference

MetalLB, bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes