Feature Overview

The current built-in load balancing solution for the API and Ingress VIPs for on-prem platforms uses Keepalived+HAProxy. While this solution provides high availability, all the incoming traffic enters via the VIPs, which are placed by Keepalived in one node at a time, and the traffic will only be balanced by HAProxy but not upfront due to the VIPs being always in the same node.

MetalLB is a technology introduced in 4.9 (OCPPLAN-7476) for the LoadBalancer service in OpenShift and it provides an active-active solution to this problem.

Goals

• Replace the built-in Keepalived+HAProxy used in the on-prem platforms Bare Metal, OSP, RHV and vSphere by a MetalLB-based solution.

Assumptions

• The solution can be implemented to replace all on-prem platforms currently using Keepalived and HAProxy.
• Existing CI jobs will work with MetalLB as they did with Keepalived+HAProxy (if regressions arise they'll be treated as bugs)

• • This change should be transparent to customers with the exception of observing how incoming traffic through the VIPs is balanced upfront and can enter through any node instead of just one node hosting the VIP permanently as the current solution does.