A full description of this work can be found in the upstream MetalLB design proposal at https://github.com/metallb/metallb/pull/832

Epic Goal

• Integrate FRR as an alternative BGP speaker for upstream MetalLB, enabling exposure and load balancing of Kubernetes services externally using BGP.

Why is this important?

• FRR is a fully-featured routing agent providing a range of protocols and configurations. Enabling FRR in MetalLB will allow us to take advantage of the full capability of FRR for bare-metal load-balancing through MetalLB.

Acceptance Criteria

• Agreed design with upstream community.
• Upstream BGP e2e tests for current BGP implementation.
• Feature parity with current BGP implementation shown through passing of e2e tests

Dependencies (internal and external)

1. FRR community for any issues, bug fixes, etc
2. FRR community for gRPC support

Open questions::

Assumptions:

• We will support configurations that mix L2 and BGP loadbalancers
• We will not support configurations that mix FRR and BGP-Metallb loadbalancer.