Charmed MetalLB Documentation

The Charmed MetalLB Operator delivers automated operations management from day 0 to day 2 on the MetalLB Load Balancer Implementation for Bare Metal Kubernetes. It is an open source, production-ready charm on top of Juju

MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols.

The Charmed MetalLB Operator provides Layer 2 (with ARP Address Resolution Protocol) or BGP(Border Gateway Protocol) to expose services.

MetalLB has support for local traffic, meaning that the machine that receives the data will be the machine that services the request. It is not suggested to use a virtual IP with high traffic workloads because only one machine will receive the traffic for a service - the other machines are solely used for failover.

BGP does not have this limitation but does see nodes as the atomic unit. This means if the service is running on two of five nodes then only those two nodes will receive traffic, but they will each receive 50% of the traffic even if one of the nodes has three pods and the other only has one pod running on it. It is recommended to use node anti-affinity to prevent Kubernetes pods from stacking on a single node.

Note:

For more information on configuring MetalLB with Calico in BGP mode, please see this explanation of the required configuration from the MetalLB website

In this documentation

Tutorials
Get started - a hands-on introduction to using Charmed Metallb operator for new users
How-to guides
Step-by-step guides covering key operations and common tasks
Reference
Technical information - specifications, APIs, architecture
Explanation
Concepts - discussion and clarification of key topics

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1 tutorial Tutorial
2 t-overview Get started with MetalLB
1 how-to How To…
2 h-manage-units Manage Units
2 h-migrate-from-split Migrate From 1.27 Release
1 reference Reference
2 r-actions Actions
2 r-configurations Configurations
2 r-libraries Libraries
2 r-integrations Integrations
1 explanation Explanation

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