👋🏻 k3d experts! I’m looking into k3d and found it interesting that it bundles an nginx container in front of k3s clusters by default. Can anybody explain the reasoning behind that design decision?

it plays a role of external load balancer to your cluster for accessing it from the host machine like AWS ELB

Understood. And what would be the pros compared to k3s’s integrated load balancer, klipper?

i don't know about klipper and i don't see any klipper in my k3d clusters

that much I learnt from https://rancher.com/docs/k3s/latest/en/networking/#service-load-balancer

Hey 👋 https://k3d.io/v5.4.1/design/defaults/#k3d-loadbalancer The k3d load-balancer is not directly related to the klipper servicelb and does not handle the Kubernetes service with

type: LoadBalancer

. It serves as the entrypoint to the k3d cluster, which is stateless and can thus easily be reconfigured, contrary to the k3s node containers (e.g. restarting them touches the cluster state). By default, all ports configured via the

--port

flags will be exposed on the k3d-lb and forwarded to the target node containers. Due to this setup, you can use

k3d cluster edit

to modify the exposed ports, without having to restart the node containers. There are more benefits to it, but that's the gist of it.

Thanks for chiming in! I think I understand the architecture correctly, thanks for confirming. I’d also be further curious to learn about the additional benefits (on top of port remapping without container restarts, as you explained, which I now understand). Reason for me being curious is I’m preparing a project and feel like going

--no-lb

, but questioned I might need it in future

Have you ever worked with AWS/EKS/ELB ? i'm asking to understand if i can use it as an similarity example

AWS yes, but I do lack experience with EKS and ELB - although I plan to soon dive into them for the same project.

EKS is a managed K8S distribution = consider it as an K3d cluster without ELB ( a load balancer ) - EKS can't be accessed from the public internet, only maybe by creating a VPC

So IIUC you are saying k3d is modeled after AWS’s EKS+ELB, on the grounds the pattern should be familiar / similar for people presumably switching back and forth, or at least with experience in the area

IIUC

??

If I Understand Correctly

are saying k3d is modeled after AWS’s EKS+ELB, on the grounds the pattern

afaik no, it was not modelled after AWS but rather this is a common pattern in cloud arch

OK, thanks

urw