metallb VS kube-plex

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.

Example: https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex

There are some projects to distribute transcoding jobs like the Unicorn Transcoder (last activity in 2021), Remote Transcoder (last activity in 2017) or the Kubernetes project (last activity in 2020)

not OP, but I have some experience with Kubernetes, plex is the last service that I haven't yet migrated to my K3s cluster. Generally speaking, Kubernetes doesn't mean HA, it does mean that if a node goes down, plex will ideally spin on on another (assuming everything is correctly configured) but an application needs to be designed specifically to be deployed in a HA way in order to scale horizontally like you are suggesting. You can see in the picture that only 1 Pod (a unit that holds a container) is actually running. There is/was a project to separate our transcode jobs into their own pods to allow for horizontal scaling of transcode jobs, but it looks like it hasn't been updated in years, sounds a bit hacky and I haven't had the confidence to try it just yet.

There is a project out there for Plex in Kubernetes btw!

-> https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex

I've been there and it's not officially supported by Plex or even Jellyfin or Emby. There's kube-plex which is not maintained anymore, probably the most success you could have is with unicorn transcoder however it forces you to stay pinned to a Plex version until the maintainers push an update.

Theres kube-plex, which does this https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex

Btw it looks like kube-plex (with pod transcoding) isn't dead yet https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex/pull/97#issuecomment-620610658