What is service type external load-balancer in Kubernetes ?

There are many different types of Kubernetes services like NodePort, ClusterIP etc. However, service type external load-balancer provides a way of exposing your application internally and/or externally in the perspective of the k8s cluster. Usually, Kubernetes CCM provider ensures that a load balancer of some sort is created, deleted and updated in your cloud. For on-prem or edge deployments however, organizations need to provide their own CCM load-balancer functions. MetalLB (initially developed at Google) has been the choice for such cases for long.

load_balancer

But edge services need to support so many exotic protocols in play like GTP, SCTP, SRv6 etc and integrating everything into a seamlessly working solution has been quite difficult. This is an area where loxilb aims to play a pivotal role.

The following is a simple yaml config file which needs to be applied to create a service type load-balancer :

 "type": "LoadBalancer"
 {
      "kind": "Service",
      "apiVersion": "v1",
      "metadata": {
        "name": "sample-service"
      },
      "spec": {
        "ports": [{
          "port": 9001,
          "targetPort": 5001
        }],
        "selector": {
          "app": "sample"
        },
        "type": "LoadBalancer"
      }
    }

However, if there is no K8s CCM plugin implementing external service load-balancer, such services won't be created and remain in pending state forever.