Create a Load Balancer

To ensure the stable operation of applications and evenly distribute traffic among pods in Kubernetes, you can use a load balancer. It helps avoid overloading individual pods, maintaining high availability and stability of services.

To create a load balancer in Kubernetes, we define a Service resource with the type LoadBalancer. Below is an example of a basic manifest:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: example-balancer
  namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
  ports:
    - port: 80            # External port for accessing the application
      targetPort: 80      # Pod port to which traffic is redirected
  type: LoadBalancer

In this example, the load balancer redirects traffic from port 80 to port 80 inside the pods matching the selector app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx.

If you need to add multiple rules for balancing, ensure that you specify the name attribute for each port:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: example-balancer
  namespace: kubernetes-dashboard
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
  ports:
    - port: 80
      targetPort: 80
      name: http
    - port: 443
      targetPort: 443
      name: https
  type: LoadBalancer

The value of the name attribute can be arbitrary.

For each port, you can specify the traffic protocol using the appProtocol attribute. This explicitly defines how the load balancer will handle traffic. By default, the value is proto-tcp.

The following values are supported:

• k8s.hostman.com/proto-http: standard HTTP traffic
• k8s.hostman.com/proto-https: HTTPS traffic
• k8s.hostman.com/proto-tcp: TCP traffic
• k8s.hostman.com/proto-tcp-ssl: TCP traffic with TLS support
• k8s.hostman.com/proto-http2: HTTP/2 traffic

After creation, the load balancer will be visible in the management panel under the Load Balancers section, with a k8s label.