OpenELB Joins CNCF SandBox, Making Service Exposure in Private Environments Easier

OpenELB Joins the CNCF Sandbox, taking LoadBalancing up a notch

Dec. 20, 2021, 8:28 p.m.

TL;DR

OpenELB, a load balancer plugin that can be used on Kubernetes, KubeSphere, and K3s, has been accepted to join CNCF Sandbox. The tool is designed for edge devices, bare metal servers, and non-public environments.

It prevents replicas conflict by managing IP addresses with Eip CRD and simplifying programming logic.

Key Facts

1
OpenELB is an open source load balancer plugin by KubeSphere
2
OpenELB can be deployed on any standard Kubernetes or K3s through YAML file or Helm chart
3
OpenELB aims to expose LoadBalancer services in non-public-cloud Kubernetes clusters
4
OpenELB has other valuable functionalities like BGP configurations using CRDs and IP address pool management.

Details

OpenELB, an open source load balancer plugin formerly known as PorterLB, has been accepted to be part of CNCF Sandbox, an entry-point for early cloud native projects.

It is a project open sourced by KubeSphere mainly to expose LoadBalancer services outside the cluster.

OpenELB can also be used on any standard Kubernetes and K3s for LoadBalancing services. LoadBalancing services are not provided on Kubernetes deployed on private environments with bare metal servers and edge clusters, and this is the problem that OpenELB solves.

OpenELB has some other functionalities that can make it preferable over similar tools like MetalLB. It prevents replicas conflict by managing IP addresses with Eip CRD and simplifying programming logic.

BGP is implemented with GoBGP by OpenELB making users have an edge with incurring lesser development cost, Dynamic configuration of GoBGP with the BgpConf and BgpPeer CRDs, provision of protocol Buffers APIs by the community when GoBGP is used as a library, and many more.

Also, OpenELB enables multiple pod replicas deployment for high availability and still maintains a healthy established connection regardless of replicas crash.

OpenELB fits well for production environments, with perfect usage history in different enterprises like E-commerce, media, IT consultancy, IaaS providers, etc.

For more details on OpenELB, check the documentation.