https://johanneskueber.com/tags/loadbalancer/Recent content in Loadbalancer on johanneskueber.comHugoen_USMon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://johanneskueber.com/posts/2026-06-01-cilium-l2-announcements/Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://johanneskueber.com/posts/2026-06-01-cilium-l2-announcements/<p>This article documents how to replace MetalLB with Cilium&rsquo;s built-in L2 announcement feature, including the IPAM pool, the announcement policy, the supporting Cilium values, and what to verify on the wire.</p> <hr> <h2 id="1-metallbs-role">1. MetalLB&rsquo;s role</h2> <p>On a bare-metal cluster, a <code>Service</code> of <code>type: LoadBalancer</code> is meaningless until something assigns it an external IP and answers ARP for that IP on the local segment. The classic answer is MetalLB in L2 mode: a controller allocates an IP from a pool; a speaker DaemonSet replies to ARP requests, advertising via gratuitous ARP after leader election.</p>