The Kube-Vip cloud provider is a general purpose cloud-provider for on-prem bare-metal or virtualised environments. It's designed to work with the kube-vip project however if a load-balancer solution follows the Kubernetes conventions then this cloud-provider will provide IP addresses that another solution can advertise.

The kube-vip-cloud-provider will only implement the loadBalancer functionality of the out-of-tree cloud-provider functionality. The design is to keep be completely decoupled from any other technologies other than the Kubernetes API, this means that the only contract is between the kube-vip-cloud-provider and the kubernetes services schema. The cloud-provider wont generate configuration information in any other format, it's sole purpose is to ensure that a new service of type:loadBalancer has been assigned an address from an address pool. It does this by updating the <service>.spec.loadBalancerIP with an address from it's IPAM, the responsibility of advertising that address and updating the <service>.status.loadBalancer.ingress.ip is left to the actual load-balancer such as kube-vip.io.

• IP address pools by CIDR
• IP ranges [start address - end address]
• Multiple pools by CIDR per namespace
• Multiple IP ranges per namespace (handles overlapping ranges)
• Setting of static addresses through --load-balancer-ip=x.x.x.x

We can apply the controller manifest directly from this repository to get the latest release:

$ kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kube-vip/kube-vip-cloud-provider/main/manifest/kube-vip-cloud-controller.yaml

It uses a statefulSet and can always be viewed with the following command:

kubectl describe pods -n kube-system kube-vip-cloud-provider-0

Any service in any namespace will take an address from the global pool cidr/range-global.

A service will take an address based upon its namespace pool cidr/range-namespace. These would look like the following:

$ kubectl get configmap -n kube-system kubevip -o yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: kubevip
  namespace: kube-system
data:
  cidr-default: 192.168.0.200/29
  cidr-development: 192.168.0.210/29
  cidr-finance: 192.168.0.220/29
  cidr-testing: 192.168.0.230/29

kubectl create configmap --namespace kube-system kubevip --from-literal cidr-global=192.168.0.220/29

kubectl create configmap --namespace kube-system kubevip --from-literal range-global=192.168.0.200-192.168.0.202

We can apply multiple pools or ranges by seperating them with commas.. i.e. 192.168.0.200/30,192.168.0.200/29 or 192.168.0.10-192.168.0.11,192.168.0.10-192.168.0.13

The logs for the cloud-provider controller can be viewed with the following command:

kubectl logs -n kube-system kube-vip-cloud-provider-0 -f