Modern Load Balancing, Improving Application's Resource Availability... Antonio Ojea & Gerrit DeWitt

Modern Load Balancing, Improving Application's Resource Availability and Performance - Antonio Ojea & Gerrit DeWitt, Google

Load balancers are a key component in modern distributed systems and Kubernetes consider them as first class citizens, using core APIs to represent them with Services for L4 and Ingress for L7. Kubernetes is also evolving these APIs using the Gateway API project, solving some of the shortcoming of existing core APIs to represent and expose all the new features of modern load balancers. Load balancers can provide different benefits to applications: service discovery, fault tolerance, better performance, cost reduction, zero downtime rolling updates, ... but this does not depend only of the loadbalancer itself, it requires a perfect coordination between all elements involved, from the application, to the network topology, deployment models, autoscaling algorithm, load balancer type, traffic characteristics, cost budget, ... During this session Antonio and Gerrit will share best practices on how to use network load balancers in Kubernetes and how to avoid the most common mistakes.