An eBPF-powered cloud-native load balancer for Kubernetes, telco, and the edge — kernel-speed traffic steering you actually control.

Welcome to LoxiLB: eBPF Load Balancing for the Cloud-Native Edge.

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 that public clouds hand you for free? LoxiLB's answer is a hyperscale software load balancer with an eBPF data plane that processes packets inside the Linux kernel, paired with a Go control plane and a Kubernetes operator called kube-loxilb. This book begins with the bare-metal load-balancing gap and why eBPF is the right tool to close it, then works through LoxiLB's split architecture, its many NAT and forwarding modes, the kube-loxilb operator and its service annotations, BGP integration and high-availability clustering, and the telco and 5G features — SCTP multi-homing, GTP, SRv6, and the service communication proxy — that set LoxiLB apart. It closes with a practical guide to running LoxiLB in production. By the end you will understand both how LoxiLB works and where it fits.

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

Contents

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