Configuring ingress cluster traffic overview

The methods are recommended, in order or preference:

For the communication methods that provide access to an external IP address, fault tolerant access to the IP address is another consideration. The following features provide fault tolerant access to an external IP address.

IP failover

IP failover manages a pool of virtual IP address for a set of nodes. It is implemented with Keepalived and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). IP failover is a layer 2 mechanism only and relies on multicast. Multicast can have disadvantages for some networks.

MetalLB

MetalLB has a layer 2 mode, but it does not use multicast. Layer 2 mode has a disadvantage that it transfers all traffic for an external IP address through one node.

Manually assigning external IP addresses