metallb VS calico

Hey guys, I want to share a guide I’m pretty proud of which is talking about setting up kubernetes which leverages https://kubespray.io/#/ and https://metallb.universe.tf/ so you can host this yourself most people when spinning up kubernetes opt for k3s or get stuck with all the options or unable to setup the external ips for their services so these tools will eliminate the problem.

Have a closer look at MetallLB.

To avoid that, you can use a combination of haproxy and keepalived, an enterprise grade load balancer like the one from F5 or Citrix. Besides that you can also work with https://kube-vip.io or https://metallb.universe.tf.

Not sure if klipper is usable in a cluster with multiple nodes, as it binds to one port only. You may want to use MetalLB instead: https://metallb.universe.tf/

Then deploy MetalLB https://metallb.universe.tf/

What issue do you see with the load balancer? For self hosted clusters, one can use MetalLB for example to have such single outfacing IP which will failover to another node keeping the same IP if a node dies.

Quoting from their docs:

metalLB to manage bare-metal LoadBalancer services - WIP - Only L2 configuration can be set-up via playbook.

wget -O calicoctl https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/releases/latest/download/calicoctl-linux-amd64 chmod +x calicoctl sudo mv calicoctl /usr/local/bin/

You could use Calico in Google Cloud GKE. Apart from the CNI, you can also use Calico for defining network policies. Feel free to join the Calico communities on slack and Github. You can visit the Project Calico slack community https://slack.projectcalico.org/ or GitHub https://github.com/projectcalico/calico

We use Calico and they view this as a paid feature. https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/issues/1035

In eBPF mode we had this one: https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/issues/7110, fixed in the upcoming v3.26.0 release.

Another thread discusses setting it up and whether the L2 with ipaddresspool is supported is here https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/issues/6789 but it seems it is not tested .

$ kubectl apply -k ./ --dry-run='client' error: accumulating resources: accumulation err='accumulating resources from 'https://github.com/projectcalico/calico/manifests/tigera-operator.yaml?ref=v3.24.4': URL is a git repository': '/tmp/kustomize-3674962985/manifests/tigera-operator.yaml' refers to file 'tigera-operator.yaml'; expecting directory

If you do kubectl get pods --all-namespaces will show all the pods in Pending state, that's because we don't have any network plugin configured with our Kubernetes cluster. I use Calico network plugin for this demo but you can use any Kubernetes network plugin of your choice as long it has ability to define host gateway routes.