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Comment by dharmab | Hacker News Reader

That's if you're using a NodePort service, which the documentation explains is for niche use cases such as if you don't have a compatible dedicated load balancer. In most professional setups you do have such a load balancer and can use other types of routing that avoid this.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/serv...

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> In most professional setups you do have such a load balancer

May I ask what one might use in an AWS cloud environment to provide that load balancer within a Region?

Does IPv6 address any of these issues? It seems to me that IPv6 is capable of providing every component in the system its own globally routable address, identity (mTLS perhaps) and transparent encryption with no extra sidecars, eBPF pieces, etc.

Ingresses on EKS will set up an ALB that sends traffic directly to pods instead of nodes (basically skips the whole K8s Service/NodePort networking setup). You have to use ` alb.ingress.kubernetes.io/target-type: ip` as an annotation I think (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/alb-ingress...).

> May I ask what one might use in an AWS cloud environment to provide that load balancer within a Region?

The AWS cloud controller will automatically set up an ALB for you if you configure a LoadBalancer service in Kubernetes. I've also done custom setups with AWS NLBs.

> Does IPv6 address any of these issues?

It could address some issues- you could conceivably create a CNI plugin which allocates an externally addressable IP to your Pods. Although you would probably still want a load balancer for custom routing rules and the improved reliability over DNS round robin.

Are ALB/NLB employed to handle traffic between pods in the same cluster? Or have I misunderstood the whole discussion?

My take on the 'eBPF will help solve service mesh' proposal is that it deals with not only ingress/egress traffic (where ALB/NLB are typically employed) but all traffic, including traffic between pods in a cluster. This is where my interests lay.

> Are ALB/NLB employed to handle traffic between pods in the same cluster?

You can choose to do so, or you can communicate directly via the built-in Kubernetes service discovery and CNI overlay network. There are use cases for both.

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