Warning: Experimental. There is no intention to ever make this viable for production. Do not use in production.
An experimental layer 4 load-balancer for Kubernetes.
The control-plane is built using Gateway API and written in Golang with Operator SDK/Controller Runtime. The data-plane is built using eBPF and is written in Rust using Aya.
Note: The word "blixt" means "lightning" in Swedish.
Current project goals are the following:
- support Gateway/GatewayClass (partially complete)
- support UDPRoute (partially complete)
- support TCPRoute (partially complete)
- use this as a basis for adding/improving Gateway API Conformance Tests
- plug this into Gateway API CI to run conformance tests on PRs
- use as a reference implementation for Gateway API (don't use it this way yet!)
After these goals are achieved, further goals may be decided.
Note: TLSRoute support may be on the table, but we're looking for someone from the community to champion this.
Note: HTTPRoute support may be on the table, but we're looking for someone from the community to champion this.
Note: The initial proof of concept was written as an XDP program, but with more features (including access to ip conntrack in newer kernels) available in TC, we made a switch to TC.
Note: Currently usage is only possible on Kubernetes In Docker (KIND) clusters. You can generate a new development cluster for testing with
make build.cluster
.
Deploy Gateway API CRDs:
kubectl apply -k https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/config/crd/experimental?ref=v0.8.1
Deploy:
kubectl apply -k config/default
At this point you should see the controlplane
and dataplane
pods running
in the blixt-system
namespace:
$ kubectl -n blixt-system get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
blixt-controlplane-cdccc685b-9dxj2 2/2 Running 0 83s
blixt-dataplane-brsl9 1/1 Running 0 83s
Check the config/samples
directory for Gateway
and *Route
examples you
can now deploy.
Note: When developing the dataplane you can make changes in your local
dataplane/
directory, and within there quickly build an image and load it into the cluster created in the above steps withmake load.image
. This will build the eBPF loader and eBPF bytecode in a container image, load that image into the cluster, and then restart the dataplane pods to use the new build.
You can reach out to the community by creating issue or
discussions. You can also reach out on Kubernetes Slack on the
#sig-network-gateway-api
channel. There is also a #ebpf
channel on
Kubernetes Slack for general eBPF related help.
The Blixt control-plane components are licensed under Apache License, Version
2.0, which is everything outside of the dataplane/
directory. The
data-plane components are dual-licensed under the General Public License,
Version 2.0 (only) and the 2-Clause BSD License (at your
option) including everything inside the dataplane/
directory.