Setting up MetalLB Load Balancer with Kubernetes k8s.

When we are deploying the Kubernetes in the local development environment and if we need to publish the services through load balancer services then Metallb load balancer is one of the easiest solutions we can use. All we need is a set of IP range from our network which metal lb can use.  

Following are the k8s configurations that need to be applied on the cluster. 

Below is the config map which mentions the IPs which can be used for the load balancers. 

apiVersion: v1

kind: ConfigMap

metadata:

namespace: metallb-system

name: config

data:

config: |

address-pools:

- name: default

protocol: layer2

addresses:

- 172.16.2.80-172.16.2.90

Below is the ansible-playbook I used to deploy the metal load balancer on the k8s cluster. 

• Initialize the master with Metallb Clusters
• Copy the metallb Configuration to master
• Kube apply the configuration on master. 

- hosts: master

remote_user: ansible

become: yes

become_method: sudo

become_user: root

gather_facts: yes

connection: ssh

tasks:

- name: Initializing Metallb cluster

shell: kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/google/metallb/v0.8.3/manifests/metallb.yaml

register: myshell_output

- name: Copying the Metallb config file

copy:

src: /Users/rahulraj/workspace/vmware-ansible/k8s/playbook/metallb-congif.yml

dest: $HOME/metallb-congif.yml

- name: Configuring Metallb cluster

shell: kubectl apply -f $HOME/metallb-congif.yml

register: myshell_output

For testing it we shall deploy a sample Nginx and expose it through load balancer type services. 

k create deployment nginx-deployments --image=nginx --replicas=3 --port=80

k expose deployment nginx-deployments --port=80 --target-port=80 --type=LoadBalancer

Output should be like following 

 kubectl get svc

NAME                TYPE           CLUSTER-IP       EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)        AGE

kubernetes          ClusterIP      10.96.0.1        <none>        443/TCP        25h

nginx-deployments   LoadBalancer   10.100.137.154   172.16.2.80   80:30973/TCP   13h