Kubernetes- Based Load Balancer as a Service for Private Cloud Infrastructures

Besides the well-known Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), another type of model has gained attention recently: Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS). This is a common practice for public clouds, but it is not the case for private ones, where such a specific service must be developed in accordance with the needs and requirements of the organization. This paper presents Global Load Balancer (GLB), an innovative solution for implementing LBaaS in CLOUDUT, an academic private cloud infrastructure. We developed the service having in mind both the needs of the users exposing their applications to the Internet and the constraints related to the number of public IP addresses available in the university. Based on Kubernetes, GLB offers high-availability and enhanced security by employing secrets in the building phase of the Docker images. Our solution allows for updating routes on the fly, with the maximum downtime of one second as shown by experimental results. In case of node failure, we managed to reduce the downtime from approximately six minutes to less than one minute.