kube-vip: Virtual IP and Load Balancing for Kubernetes
Shriira Press
A virtual IP and load balancer for the Kubernetes control plane and bare-metal Services, with no external hardware required.
Welcome to kube-vip: Virtual IP and Load Balancing for Kubernetes.
Every production Kubernetes cluster needs a stable, highly available address for its API server, and most clusters eventually need to expose Services to the outside world. In the cloud those needs are met by managed load balancers you never see. On bare metal, in a home lab, or at the edge there is no such luxury, and that gap is exactly what kube-vip fills. It is a small, self-contained component that gives the control plane a floating virtual IP backed by leader election, and gives LoadBalancer Services real external addresses drawn from pools you define, announcing all of it to the network with either gratuitous ARP at Layer 2 or BGP at Layer 3. This book starts with the high-availability problem and what a virtual IP actually is, then works through the control plane VIP, how leader election decides who owns it and how failover happens, the two announcement modes in depth, the Services side and the companion cloud provider, and finally how to run kube-vip well in production. By the end you will understand not just how to deploy it, but why each piece works the way it does.
This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.
A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.
We hope it serves you well.
— Shriira Press