After lurking for a long time around this topic i pulled the trigger a couple of days ago and shopped the components to build a raspberry pi powered kubernetes cluster at home. The main purpose is to learn new things and get my hands dirty on kubernetes and the project attached to the cloud native computing foundation.

Setting this up was very easy thanks to k3sup and arkade. But i was lacking a loadbalancer support. In cloud environments this is where the infrastructure provided by the cloud provider kicks in.

This is where MetalLB can help you. MetalLB provides a LoadBalancer and maps this to an definded IP Range so that you can reach your Containers over the Network.

I assume that you have a Kubernetes Cluster up and running and that your kubectl command is working.

Lets create a local directory in which we can download the needed .yaml files. In my case i have a kubernetes directory inside of my homedirectory.

cd ~/kubernetes
mkdir metallb
cd metallb
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.6/manifests/namespace.yaml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.6/manifests/metallb.yaml

This files will be used to deploy MetalLB on your Kubernetes Cluster. But we will need to define a pool of ip addresses which can be used by MetalLB. Lets create a file config.yaml inside our metallb directory with the following content (adjust the ip pool as needed)

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  namespace: metallb-system
  name: config
data:
  config: |
    address-pools:
    - name: default
      protocol: layer2
      addresses:
      - 192.168.1.50-192.168.1.60

We have now everything we need to deploy MetalLB

kubectl apply -f namespace.yaml
kubectl apply -f metallb.yaml
kubectl create secret generic -n metallb-system memberlist --from-literal=secretkey="$(openssl rand -base64 128)"
kubectl apply -f config.yaml

You can check the status of your Pods

kubectl get pods -n metallb-system
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
controller-64f86798cc-79574   1/1     Running   0          5h44m
speaker-wfzwc                 1/1     Running   0          5h44m
speaker-gjm88                 1/1     Running   0          5h44m
speaker-l2z7r                 1/1     Running   0          5h44m
speaker-5fm5v                 1/1     Running   0          5h44m

And your Services with a type of LoadBalancer should have been assigned a working External-IP now:

kubectl get svc --all-namespaces | grep LoadBalancer
kube-system            traefik                     LoadBalancer   10.43.154.37    192.168.1.50   80:31596/TCP,443:31489/TCP   18h
openfaas               gateway-external            LoadBalancer   10.43.40.74     192.168.1.15   8080:31461/TCP               17h

thanks for reading… :)