OpenELB Joins the CNCF Sandbox, Making Service Exposure in Private Environments Easier
Tags: kubernetes, opensource, cloudnative, cloud
Published: 2021-12-20 08:35:30

The KubeSphere Team announced that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) had accepted OpenELB, a load balancer plugin designed for on-premises environments - as its latest Sandbox project.
 

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/q9w704dw3jgumfr4x3ah.jpg) 
OpenELB, formerly known as "PorterLB," is a **load balancer plugin** designed for bare metal servers, edge devices, and private environments. It serves as a LoadBalancer plugin for **Kubernetes**, **K3s**, and KubeSphere, to expose LoadBalancer services to outside the cluster. OpenELB provides the following core features:
 
· Load balancing in BGP mode and Layer 2 mode
· ECMP-based load balancing
· IP address pool management
· BGP configurations using CRDs
 

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/vg1fikau1qqucquz1fbr.jpg)
According to a survey among 5,000 IT professionals, KubeSphere Community noticed that nearly 36% of users deploy Kubernetes on bare-metal environments, while many users install and deploy Kubernetes or K3s on air-gapped data centers or edge devices. In private environments, exposing LoadBalancer service is challenging.
 
Cloud providers usually provide cloud-based LoadBalancer plugins, which require users to deploy their clusters on specific IaaS platforms, while most users deploy Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal environments, especially in production. However, for private environments with bare-metal nodes and edge devices, Kubernetes does not provide a LoadBalancer solution.

[OpenELB](https://kubesphere.io/blogs/openelb-joins-cncf-sandbox-project/) is designed to expose LoadBalancer services in bare-metal, edge, and virtualization environments. It provides easy-to-use EIPs and makes IP address pool management easier for users in private environments. Compared with the same type of LoadBalancer plugins, OpenELB has several outstanding advantages: cloud-native architecture, flexible IP address management, advertising routes using GoBGP, simple architecture with less resource consumption.
 
Since its first release, OpenELB has been used in production environments by many enterprises in different industries such as IaaS providers, e-commerce, media, smart manufacturing, IT consultancy, and more. It also has attracted 14 contributors and more than 100 community members worldwide as an open source project. Next, OpenELB will develop the high availability of VIP mode based on Keepalived, implement kube-spiserver HA, and provide features such as independent user interface and EIP/IP Pool configuration.


The KubeSphere team has always been upholding the "Upstream first" principle. In July 2021, the KubeSphere team donated Fluentbit Operator as a CNCF sub-project to the Fluent community. Now OpenELB, which was initiated by the KubeSphere team, also joins the CNCF sandbox. In the future, the KubeSphere team will serve as one of the participants of the OpenELB project and maintain its commitment to open source.


**About KubeSphere**

[KubeSphere](https://kubesphere.io) is a distributed operating system for cloud-native application management, using Kubernetes as its kernel. It provides a plug-and-play architecture, allowing third-party applications to be seamlessly integrated into its ecosystem.
 
KubeSphere offers wizard web UI and various enterprise-grade features for operation and maintenance, including multi-cloud and multi-cluster management, [DevOps (CI/CD)](https://kubesphere.io/devop), application lifecycle management, [service mesh](https://kubesphere.io/service-mesh), multi-tenancy, observability, storage and network management, and GPU support. 
 
For more information, you can visit https://kubesphere.io or https://github.com/kubesphere.