Hey everyone! If you’re running Kubernetes, especially on-prem, bare-metal, or at the edge, you know that getting traffic into your cluster can be a pain. Setting up high availability (HA) for your control plane or getting a LoadBalancer service to work without a fancy cloud provider’s magic is tricky.

There a solution that, Kube Vip! It’s a lightweight, cloud-native (now a CNCF project) tool that steps in to solve exactly these problems.

So, What Kubevip It?

At its core, Kube Vip gives you a stable virtual IP (VIP) for both your cluster’s control plane and your Kubernetes services (type LoadBalancer). It does this without needing any clunky, expensive external hardware load balancers. It’s built to be simple and robust, using standard networking protocols.

My Lab Configuration

For this test, I used the following: Physical 2 x Raspberry Pi5 2 x Raspberry Pi4 MSI NUC Mini PC 32 Cores 32GB RAM and 250GB NVME Router Dedicated 1GBps Network Switch

Logical 4 (2VMs) Master\Control Plane Nodes -running ubuntu with k3s 4 (2VMs) Worker Nodes -running ubuntu with k3s Proxmox K8s Cluster

Workloads Cert Manager Nginx Prometheus Argo

The Good Stuff (Advantages)

  • No External Hardware: This is the big one. You can get HA and load balancing using just software. This is a massive win for bare-metal, edge, or even vSphere clusters where you don’t have an AWS or GCP load balancer on speed dial.
  • Ease of Deployment: I find deploying Kubevip is quite seamless.
  • Does Both Jobs: It handles HA for your control plane (so your cluster’s “brain” doesn’t have a single point of failure) AND it manages LoadBalancer services, giving your apps an external IP.
  • Flexible Network Modes: It’s not a one-trick pony.
    • ARP (Layer 2): Super simple setup. It basically just shouts “Hey, I own this IP now!” to the local network using ARP. It’s great for small or simple setups.
    • BGP (Layer 3): For more serious networking. It peers with your routers (if they speak BGP) to advertise the VIP. This is way more scalable and robust for larger clusters.
  • Lightweight & Cloud-Native: It’s a CNCF project, so it’s built to fit right into the Kubernetes ecosystem without a lot of overhead.

The “Gotchas” (Disadvantages)

  • ARP Can Be “Chatty”: The simple ARP mode works by broadcasting. In some complex or large Layer 2 networks, this can be “noisy” or lead to network flapping if not configured carefully.
  • BGP Requires BGP: The more robust BGP mode is awesome, but it does require you to have routers that speak BGP and to configure that peering. If you’re not a “network person,” this can be a steep learning curve.
  • It’s Not a Full Ingress: Kube Vip is fantastic at what it does: giving you an IP but It doesn’t handle Layer 7 routing. You’ll still need an Ingress Controller (like NGINX or Traefik) behind it for that.

The Verdict and Rating

Kube Vip is an awesome tool, especially for any cluster running outside a major cloud. It solves a very specific, very common problem (getting a stable IP!) in a simple and elegant way. If you’re building a bare-metal or on-prem cluster, definitely check it out. Kube Vip is a currently in Sanbox and already packs a lot of amazing features. I highly recommend that you try Kube Vip in your home lab. Enterprise usage wise, it is worth Kube Vip is certainly exploring but there are other more mature solution as of the time of writing such as CNI, Antrea, OpenVSwitch, and NSX just name a few.

References

  • Kubevip Documentation: https://kube-vip.io/docs/
  • Chris Lempa Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cbniIZUpXM
  • CNCF: https://landscape.cncf.io/?item=runtime–cloud-native-network–kube-vip