Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool that requires users to use load balancing to efficiently use this tool. Load balancing prevents users from dealing with unresponsive services and applications and also turns out to be an invisible facilitator between a client and a group of servers. At peak times, websites have to deal with several queries, and to cater to this demand organizations spread the workload over many servers. This not only saves cost but also allows even distribution of load across all servers. Kubernetes load balancing has become significant for businesses because it prevents a single server from crashing and due to its excessive user demands, all latest applications cannot run without it.

Servers can be virtual, physical, or part of hybrid solutions that can be in the cloud, in a data center, or on-premises. In such a scenario load balancing has to work across diverse platforms, as users are required to achieve the greatest output with the lowest response time.  The load balancing process can be considered as a traffic cop, as it routes all incoming requests and data across all servers. In this process, it is also ensured that no single server is overworked and it efficiently handles the chaotic situation. If a server goes down, the load balancer automatically redirects traffic and if a new server is included in the server pool, then its resource is automatically allocated by the load balancer.

Benefits of Load Balancing

Load balancing not only provides high availability to businesses and companies but also serves other valuable advantages:

• Load balancing provides a quick and qualitative response to demand if there is an increase in transactions.
• Load balancing makes sure that high availability is achieved in case of platform transitions.
• Load balancing reduces a system slowdown if the user is running a different version of an application in two distinct environments.
• When using Kubernetes load balancers, users have the very best data monitoring and analytics, as it improves server utilization, provides faster data transactions, and reduces system down events.
• During maintenance, outages are reduced because users are routed to online servers.

Types of Load Balancers in Kubernetes

Kubernetes load balancer is the process of task distributions over a set of resources that results in quick and efficient processing. The tasks are evenly distributed to prevent the overloading of computer nodes and also optimize the response time. In Kubernetes, two types of load balancers are there, internal load balancers and external load balancers. Internal load balancers send information across containers within the same Virtual Private Cloud. The External Load Balancers send external HTTP requests directly into a cluster along with an IP address and then the cluster sends internet traffic to nodes identified by ports.

How does Kubernetes Load Balancer Work?

Kubernetes load balancer focuses on two functions, the first is to expose Kubernetes services to the outside world and the second is to balance network traffic loads to those services. Containers that are related by function in Kubernetes are organized into pods and all related pods are organized into a service. Kubernetes automatically create and destroy pods as required because these are not designed to be persistent. Every pod comes with a new IP address and since pods are not consistent even their IP address is also not consistent. Nevertheless, a stable ClusterIP is assigned to a group of pods that can be accessed within that Kubernetes cluster only. These pods can be accessed by other Kubernetes containers within a service through a Cluster that are not accessible from outside the cluster. Thus, to handle all requests from outside the cluster and pass traffic along the services, users will require a load balancer. The other type of load balancer is the true network traffic load balancing. It distributes network traffic to services as per predetermined algorithms.