Load Balancer Provider

[moshloop]

/kind feature

One of the long-standing issues in CAPV is the lack of a default/standard load balancer for vSphere environments - Many options exist (VMC ELB, F5, NSX, IPVS, Client-Side) but nothing would apply to all environments.

We, therefore, need a mechanism to support arbitrary load balancer implementations.

The first question that needs to be answered is where does this belong as a high-level provider similar to the bootstrap provider, or as an implementation detail in CAPV?

Note: This refers to the load balancer for control plane endpoints, not Service Type Load Balancer

kubernetes-sigs/cluster-api-provider-vsphere#491

[moshloop]

/assign @timothysc @akutz @yastij

[moshloop]

Potential implications for: #1197

[detiber]

@moshloop this aligns with my original ideas around how we should rework the "Cluster Infrastructure" when we first started discussing v1alpha2 changes. This also extends beyond just vSphere, but also affects bare metal and even OpenStack environments.

My thought was that we should split the existing monolithic cluster infrastructure into 3 separate components:

• Load Balancer provider
• Network provider
• Firewall provider

What we are lacking is a CAEP/design doc around how we could implement this on top of v1alpha2.

[vincepri]

/kind design

If there is enough interest, this functionality should be spec'd in a CAEP.

[moshloop]

I will try and create a CAEP for this.
/assign

[yastij]

@detiber - If there's enough traction on this then I'm happy to help on this.
one question that comes to my mind, if we want to have cluster infrastructure "composability" we'd need some new APIs to support this, would this be for v1a3 ?