Summary

I have been using metal LB from quite some time now, even though the website still says the they are in beta, I have found it to be quite stable for my needs.

Why metal LB?

Kubernetes does not offer an implementation of network load-balancers (Services of type LoadBalancer) for bare metal clusters. The implementations of Network LB that Kubernetes does ship with are all glue code that calls out to various IaaS platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure…). If you’re not running on a supported IaaS platform (GCP, AWS, Azure…), LoadBalancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created. Bare metal cluster operators are left with two lesser tools to bring user traffic into their clusters, “NodePort” and “externalIPs” services. Both of these options have significant downsides for production use, which makes bare metal clusters second class citizens in the Kubernetes ecosystem. MetalLB aims to redress this imbalance by offering a Network LB implementation that integrates with standard network equipment, so that external services on bare metal clusters also “just work” as much as possible.

How to install metal LB by manifest?

Step 1 -> Creating a namespace

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.10.2/manifests/namespace.yaml

Step 2 -> Installing metal lb

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.10.2/manifests/metallb.yaml

Step 3 -> Creating a config file and setting up a range of IP addresses

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  namespace: metallb-system
  name: config
data:
  config: |
    address-pools:
    - name: default
      protocol: layer2
      addresses:
      - 192.168.1.240-192.168.1.250

Step 4 -> Applying the ConfigMap

kubectl apply -f config.yaml

Reference

Official Documentation