Technology · Ebook

LoxiLB: eBPF Load Balancing for the Cloud-Native Edge

by Shriira Press

LoxiLB is a CNCF Sandbox project that answers a stubborn question: when your Kubernetes cluster runs on bare metal, at the edge, or inside a telco network, who provides the external LoadBalancer service the public clouds hand you for free? Its answer is a hyperscale software load balancer with an eBPF data plane that processes packets inside the Linux kernel, a Go control plane, and a Kubernetes operator, kube-loxilb. This book covers the bare-metal load-balancing gap, why eBPF is the right tool to close it, LoxiLB's split architecture, its NAT and forwarding modes, the kube-loxilb operator, BGP and high-availability clustering, and the telco and 5G features — SCTP, GTP, SRv6, and the service communication proxy — before a practical guide to running it.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — The Bare-Metal Load Balancer Gap
3. 3Chapter 2 — Why eBPF
4. 4Chapter 3 — Inside LoxiLB's Architecture
5. 5Chapter 4 — NAT and Forwarding Modes
6. 6Chapter 5 — kube-loxilb: The Kubernetes Operator
7. 7Chapter 6 — BGP and High Availability
8. 8Chapter 7 — Telco, 5G, and the Edge
9. 9Chapter 8 — LoxiLB in Practice