NOTE All documentation of both usage and architecture are now available at https://kube-vip.io

Kubernetes Virtual IP and Load-Balancer for both control pane and Kubernetes services

The idea behind kube-vip is a small self-contained Highly-Available option for all environments, especially:

• Bare-Metal
• Edge (arm / Raspberry PI)
• Pretty much anywhere else :)

The kube-vip application builds a multi-node or multi-pod cluster to provide High-Availability. When a leader is elected, this node will inherit the Virtual IP and become the leader of the load-balancing within the cluster.

When running out of cluster it will use raft clustering technology

When running in cluster it will use leader election

The purpose of kube-vip is to simplify the building of HA Kubernetes clusters, which at this time can involve a few components and configurations that all need to be managed. This was blogged about in detail by thebsdbox here -> https://thebsdbox.co.uk/2020/01/02/Designing-Building-HA-bare-metal-Kubernetes-cluster/#Networking-load-balancing.

kube-vip provides both a floating or virtual IP address for your kubernetes cluster as well as load-balancing the incoming traffic to various control-plane replicas. At the current time to replicate this functionality a minimum of two pieces of tooling would be required:

VIP:

• Keepalived
• Ucarp
• Hardware Load-balancer (functionality differs per vendor)

LoadBalancing:

• HAProxy
• Nginx
• Hardware Load-balancer(functionality differs per vendor)

All of these would require a separate level of configuration and in some infrastructures multiple teams in order to implement. Also when considering the software components, they may require packaging into containers or if they’re pre-packaged then security and transparency may be an issue. Finally, in edge environments we may have limited room for hardware (no HW load-balancer) or packages solutions in the correct architectures might not exist (e.g. ARM). Luckily with kube-vip being written in GO, it’s small(ish) and easy to build for multiple architectures, with the added security benefit of being the only thing needed in the container.

The usage of kube-vip can either be directly by taking the binary / building yourself (make build), or alternatively through a pre-built docker container which can be found in the plunder Docker Hub repository https://hub.docker.com/r/plndr/kube-vip. For further

To generate the basic yaml configuration:

kube-vip sample config > config.yaml

Modify the localPeer section to match this particular instance (local IP address/port etc..) and ensure that the remotePeers section is correct for the current instance and all other instances in the cluster. Also ensure that the interface is the correct interface that the vip will bind to.

To start kube-vip ensure the configuration for the localPeers and remotePeers is correct for each instance and the cluster as a whole and start:

kube-vip start -c /config.yaml
INFO[0000] Reading configuration from [config.yaml]       
INFO[0000] 2020-02-01T15:41:04.287Z [INFO]  raft: initial configuration: index=1 servers="[{Suffrage:Voter ID:server1 Address:192.168.0.70:10000} {Suffrage:Voter ID:server2 Address:192.168.0.71:10000} {Suffrage:Voter ID:server3 Address:192.168.0.72:10000}]" 
INFO[0000] 2020-02-01T15:41:04.287Z [INFO]  raft: entering follower state: follower="Node at 192.168.0.70:10000 [Follower]" leader= 
INFO[0000] Started                                      
INFO[0000] The Node [] is leading                       
INFO[0001] The Node [] is leading                       
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.522Z [WARN]  raft: heartbeat timeout reached, starting election: last-leader= 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.522Z [INFO]  raft: entering candidate state: node="Node at 192.168.0.70:10000 [Candidate]" term=2 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.522Z [DEBUG] raft: votes: needed=2 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.522Z [DEBUG] raft: vote granted: from=server1 term=2 tally=1 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.523Z [DEBUG] raft: newer term discovered, fallback to follower 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.523Z [INFO]  raft: entering follower state: follower="Node at 192.168.0.70:10000 [Follower]" leader= 
INFO[0001] 2020-02-01T15:41:05.838Z [WARN]  raft: failed to get previous log: previous-index=2 last-index=1 error="log not found" 
INFO[0002] The Node [192.168.0.72:10000] is leading    

After a few seconds with additional nodes started a leader election will take place and the leader will assume the vip.