loxilb is an open source cloud-native load-balancer based on GoLang/eBPF with the goal of achieving cross-compatibility across a wide range of on-prem, public-cloud or hybrid K8s environments. loxilb is being developed to support the adoption of cloud-native tech in telco, mobility, and edge computing.
Kubernetes defines many service constructs like cluster-ip, node-port, load-balancer, ingress etc for pod to pod, pod to service and outside-world to service communication.
All these services are provided by load-balancers/proxies operating at Layer4/Layer7. Since Kubernetes's is highly modular, these services can be provided by different software modules. For example, kube-proxy is used by default to provide cluster-ip and node-port services. For some services like LB and Ingress, no default is usually provided.
Service type load-balancer is usually provided by public cloud-provider(s) as a managed entity. But for on-prem and self-managed clusters, there are only a few good options available. Even for provider-managed K8s like EKS, there are many who would want to bring their own LB to clusters running anywhere. loxilb provides service type load-balancer as its main use-case. loxilb can be run in-cluster or ext-to-cluster as per user need.
loxilb works as a L4 load-balancer/service-proxy by default. Although L4 load-balancing provides great performance and functionality, an equally performant L7 load-balancer is also necessary in K8s for various use-cases. loxilb also supports L7 load-balancing in the form of Kubernetes Ingress implementation which is enhanced with eBPF sockmap helpers. This also benefit users who need L4 and L7 load-balancing under the same hood.
Additionally, loxilb also supports:
- kube-proxy replacement with eBPF(full cluster-mesh implementation for Kubernetes)
- Ingress Support
- Kubernetes Gateway API
- Kubernetes Network Policies
For deploying telco-cloud with cloud-native functions, loxilb can be used as a SCP(service communication proxy). SCP is a communication proxy defined by 3GPP and aimed at telco micro-services running in cloud-native environment. Read more in this blog
Telco-cloud requires load-balancing and communication across various interfaces/standards like N2, N4, E2(ORAN), S6x, 5GLAN, GTP etc. Each of these present its own unique challenges which loxilb aims to solve e.g.:
- N4 requires PFCP level session-intelligence
- N2 requires NGAP parsing capability(Related Blogs - Blog-1, Blog-2, Blog-3)
- S6x requires Diameter/SCTP multi-homing LB support(Related Blog)
- MEC use-cases might require UL-CL understanding(Related Blog)
- Hitless failover support might be essential for mission-critical applications
- E2 might require SCTP-LB with OpenVPN bundled together
- SIP support is needed to enable cloud-native VOIP
Performsmuch better compared to its competitors across various architectures- Utitlizes ebpf which makes it
flexibleas well ascustomizable - Advanced
quality of servicefor workloads (per LB, per end-point or per client) - Works with
anyKubernetes distribution/CNI - k8s/k3s/k0s/kind/OpenShift + Calico/Flannel/Cilium/Weave/Multus etc - Kube-proxy replacement with loxilb allows
simple plug-inwith any existing/deployed pod-networking software - Extensive support for
SCTP workloads(with multi-homing) on K8s - Dual stack with
NAT66, NAT64support for K8s - K8s
multi-clustersupport (planned 🚧) - Runs in
anycloud (public cloud/on-prem) orstandaloneenvironments
- L4/NAT stateful loadbalancer
- NAT44, NAT66, NAT64 with One-ARM, FullNAT, DSR etc
- Support for TCP, UDP, SCTP (w/ multi-homing), QUIC, FTP, TFTP etc
- High-availability support with BFD detection for hitless/maglev/cgnat clustering
- Extensive and scalable end-point liveness probes for cloud-native environments
- Stateful firewalling and IPSEC/Wireguard support
- Optimized implementation for features like Conntrack, QoS etc
- Full compatibility for ipvs (ipvs policies can be auto inherited)
- Policy oriented L7 proxy support - HTTP1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0
- GoLang based control plane components
- A scalable/efficient eBPF based data-path implementation
- Integrated goBGP based routing stack
- A kubernetes operator kube-loxilb written in Go
- A kubernetes ingress implementation
- Understanding loxilb modes and deployment in K8s with kube-loxilb
- Understanding High-availability with loxilb
- K3s : loxilb with default flannel
- K3s : loxilb with calico
- K3s : loxilb with cilium
- K0s : loxilb with default kube-router networking
- EKS : loxilb ext-mode
- K3s : loxilb in-cluster mode
- K0s : loxilb in-cluster mode
- MicroK8s : loxilb in-cluster mode
- EKS : loxilb in-cluster mode
- How-To : Service-group zones with loxilb
- How-To : Access end-points outside K8s
- How-To : Deploy multi-server K3s HA with loxilb
- How-To : Deploy loxilb with multi-AZ HA support in AWS
- How-To : Deploy loxilb with ingress-nginx
- What is eBPF
- What is k8s service - load-balancer
- Architecture in brief
- Code organization
- eBPF internals of loxilb
- What are loxilb NAT Modes
- loxilb load-balancer algorithms
- Manual steps to build/run
- Debugging loxilb
- loxicmd command-line tool usage
- Developer's guide to loxicmd
- Developer's guide to loxilb API
- API Reference - loxilb web-Api
- Performance Reports
- Development Roadmap
- Contribute
- System Requirements
- Frequenctly Asked Questions- FAQs
- Blogs
- Demo Videos
Join the loxilb Slack channel to chat with loxilb developers and other loxilb users. This is a good place to learn about loxilb, ask questions, and work collaboratively.
Feel free to post your queries in github discussion. If you find any issue/bugs, please raise an issue in github and members from loxilb community will be happy to help.
| Features(Ubuntu20.04) | Features(Ubuntu22.04) | Features(RedHat9) |
|---|---|---|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
||
|
| K3s Tests | K8s Cluster Tests | EKS Test |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |
||
 |