Cloud Native Load Balancing From Scratch

Explore cloud-native load balancing techniques in this 33-minute conference talk by Fangyuan Li from VMware. Gain insights into various load balancing options such as gRPC, Envoy, and IPVS/BPF, and learn when and how to integrate them into your stack for optimal system scalability. Begin with a simple VIP iptable implementation, then delve into the journey from client to server and kernel to userspace, examining load balancing from IP to HTTP levels. Follow along with demonstrations using plain Bash scripts and compare different tools across Kubernetes (clusterIP/nodePort), Docker (routing mesh), Envoy, and various CNI plugins. Demystify load balancing in Kubernetes and understand the tradeoffs and applicable scenarios for each technique to make informed decisions for your distributed systems.