Release Notes

Version 0.14.8

Feature

  • Use frr-k8s 0.0.14. (#2467, @fedepaol)

Bug fixes

  • Fix the broken all-in-one/kustomize manifests from v0.14.7.

Version 0.14.7

Bug fixes

  • Fix the double immutable field validation in the ServiceL2Status CRD, which may make the validation of the CRD to fail. (#2461, @fedepaol)

Version 0.14.6

Feature

  • Add graceful-restart support in frr mode (#2386, @karampok)
  • Add helm / configuration parameters to allow MetalLB to consume an frr-k8s instance running in a separate namespace. (#2444, @fedepaol)
  • The speaker and the controller containers are now based on a distroless image, reducing the attack surface (#2418, @minmzzhang)
  • Use frr 9.1.0 and frr-k8s 0.0.13. (#2450, #2456, @fedepaol)

Documentation

  • Upgrade Hugo to v0.124.1, Theme change to Hugo Relearn Theme (version: 5.27.0) (#2364, @tico88612)

Bug or Regression

  • Enable Layer2Service status, a crd to monitor the status of a service exposed via L2 (#2351, @lwabish)
  • Fix session flapping when adding / removing services and BFD is enabled. (#2454, @fedepaol)
  • Fix(chart,prometheusrules): alert not matching labels for e.g. speakers (#2453, @sebastiangaiser)
  • Limit processing the node events when label changes or when only the NetworkUnavailable condition changes, as opposed to processing when every condition (including heartbeats!) changes. (#2452, @shettyg)
  • Propagate the metallb labels to the speaker’s service monitor service (#2390, @huseyinbabal)

This release includes contributions from Ethan Leisinger, Federico Paolinelli, François Rigault, Guru Shetty, huseyinbabal, karampok, lwabish, Min Zhang, Sebastian Gaiser, tico88612, Tyler Auerbeck. Thanks!

Version 0.14.5

New features:

  • Bump frr-k8s to 0.0.11 (#2357, @AlinaSecret)
  • Support BGP disableMP field in FRR-K8s mode (#2357, @AlinaSecret)

BugFixes:

  • Fix the handling of readyness conditions of endpointslices: instead of looking at the serving condition first, we look at the ready condition. This allows metallb to respect the publishNotReadyAddresses field of the services. (#2337, @farodin91)

This release include contributions from Adrian Vondendriesch, Alina Sudakov, clonefetch, Federico Paolinelli, Jan Jansen, lwabish, Micah Nagel, tico88612, tozastation. Thanks!

Version 0.14.4

New features:

  • Add option to configure BGP connect time (PR_2144)
  • Bump FRR to 9.0.2 (PR 2282, Issue 2256)
  • Make the name of webhook service and cert metallb specific to avoid name conflicts with other resources in the cluster. (PR 2244, Issue 2174).
  • Provide a “ignore-exclude-lb” flag to ignore the exclude-from-external-load-balancers label (PR 2280, Issue 2274)
  • The log level of the logs for skipping the BGP announcement because of the ’node.kubernetes.io/exclude-from-external-load-balancer’ label and the network unavailable condition are now warning instead of debug. (#2275, @clee)
  • The metallb-excludel2 configmap is not deployed from the Helm chart if the speaker is disabled. (#2298, @mustdiechik)
  • Add a field to the BGPPeer CRD to disable MP BGP for the given peer (#2306, @AlinaSecret)
  • Bump frr-k8s to 0.0.10 (#2306, @AlinaSecret)
  • Support BGP Connect time field in FRR-K8s mode (#2305, @AlinaSecret)

BugFixes:

  • Fix the non existing conversion webhook in the Helm CRDs (PR 2269)
  • Remove dangling AddressPool leftovers (PR 2272 Issue 2270)
  • Helm: fix the creation of the metrics-certs volume under the presence of the speakerMetricsTLSSecret value, regardless of FRR being enabled (PR 2286)
  • Docs: remove outdated information about multiprotocol services (PR 2228).
  • FRR Config: generate the route-map for each local pref / community / large community only once (PR 2292)
  • Propagate the loglevel to the controller runtime too (PR , Issue 2161)
  • Expose the speaker metrics port only to localhost if kuberbacproxy is added, so metrics are exported as encrypted only. (#2315, @fedepaol)

This release include contributions from Alina Sudakov, budimanjojo, Chris Lee, cyclinder, Federico Paolinelli, Fish-pro, Kyle Fazzari, Lior Noy, lwabish, Ori Braunshtein, renklus, Ruslan Khizhnyak, shimritproj, tico88612. Thanks!

Version 0.14.3

BugFixes:

  • Do not deploy the deprecated AddressPool crds and webhooks. The code that was handling them was removed, it makes no sense to deploy them. (PR 2267).

Version 0.14.2

New features:

  • Add a new experimental “FRR-K8s” based BGP backend (PR 2162, (PR 2183) and others, Design proposal: an instance of FRR can be shared between FRR and other actors, allowing multiple FRR configurations (as long as they don’t conflict), via the FRR-K8s API
  • Remove IP verification: don’t stale the config if it removes / reassign an IP belonging to a service but honor the configuration (PR 2097, Issue 462
  • Drop the support for endpoints and rely on endpoint slices only (Issue 2253, PR 2254) NOTE: this will make MetalLB not compatible with clusters older than 1.21
  • Add support for speaker securityContext (PR 2099)
  • Remove support for the legacy AddressPool API in favor of IPAddressPools. Being deprecated for a while we finally stop handling the legacy API and remove it, IPs can now be allocated to LoadBalancer Services only via IPAddressPool resources. (PR 2252)
  • Make the controller preserve the state after reboot. This will allow existing services to keep their IP after restart of the controller (PR 2004, Issue 1984
  • Use the “serving” field of endpoint slices (PR 2088, Issue 2074
  • Make the webhook secret’s name configurable (PR 2070, Issue 1993
  • Allow custom bind address for memberlist (PR 2121)
  • Add a fieldOwner to the CRDs caBundle field, to prevend CI / CD systems to reconciliate them (PR 2122, Issue 1681
  • Use AES-256 for memberlist encryption (PR 2140, Issue 1982)
  • Add extraContainers to the speaker / controller pods (PR 2152)
  • Speaker: Allow configuring MemberList timeouts for WAN environments (PR 2178)
  • Allow tls-cipher-suites and tls-min-version via parameters, and set defaults (PR 2083)
  • Implement NodeExcludeBalancers to exclude nodes as external loadbalancer (PR 2073, ISSUE 2021)
  • Metrics: add ipv4/6 addresses_in_use_total and addresses_total (PR 2151)
  • E2E: Verify autoAssign=False works(PR 2264,ISSUE 2221)
  • Implement ServiceL2Status CRD to expose service announcing status in layer2 mode (PR 2198)

Bug Fixes:

  • FRR mode: FRR templates: provide a seqnum for the prefix lists (PR 2075
  • Webhooks: avoid transient errors (PR 2202), ISSUE 2173)
  • Remove the pointer packages and utilize the ‘ptr’ utility package of Kubernetes (PR 2223)

This release includes contributions from Andreas Karis, Antonio Pitasi, Arjun Singh, AzraelSec, cong, cyclinder, Federico Paolinelli, Giovanni Toraldo, Ivan Kurnosov, Jonas Badstübner, Lior Noy, machinaexdeo, Marcelo Guerrero Viveros, Micah Nagel, Michael Aspinwall, Moritz Schlarb, Ori Braunshtein, Pavel Basov, Robin, shimritproj, Siyi.Yang, timm0e. Thanks!

Version 0.13.12

  • Change the version of go used to compile the binaries
  • Disable http2 on the webhook listener
  • Bump the kubernetes dependencies

This release includes contributions from Federico Paolinelli, Ori Braunshtein, Micah Nagel

Version 0.13.11

New features:

  • Add namespaces to resources generated using helm templates (PR 1965, Issue 1964)
  • Improve FRR liveness probes configurability in helm charts (PR 2034, Issue 1963) to make MetalLB’s FRR more tolerant to low resources deployments
  • Bump FRR to version to 8.5.2 PR 2051

Bug Fixes:

  • Reprocess all the services only when a pool of IPs changes, and not every time the controller receives it (PR 1951 )
  • Delete BFD profiles from the configuration when deleted from CRs (PR 1973)
  • Fix kustomize v5 deprecations (PR 1986, Issue 1985)
  • Make the configuration conversion stable and avoid unnecessary FRR reloads (PR 1990)
  • Change the “interface to exclude” log to debug to avoid spamming logs (PR 1992)
  • Improve the regex excluding well known interfaces from L2 announcement (PR 2058), Issue 2057

This release includes contributions from Andreas Lindhé, ankitm123, cyclinder, Federico Paolinelli, Joshua Cooper, Lior Noy, Marcelo Guerrero Viveros, Patryk Małek, Peter Grace, Rodrigo Campos, Sebastian-RG, Simon, Simon Smith.

Thank you!

Version 0.13.10

New Features:

  • Bumped the FRR version used by MetalLB to 8.4.2 (PR 1829)
  • Charts: enable additional controller / speaker labels (PR 1797)
  • l2: exclude common virtual interfaces for announce services (PR 1767)
  • FRR Mode: provide a way to append a piece of configuration (PR 1863)
  • Local Preference validation across multiple advertisements (PR 1820)
  • Charts: support rbacproxy custom pull policy (PR 1851)
  • Add support for large communities (PR 1898)
  • Optimization: on service delete reprocess the services only if the service had an IP assigned (PR 1945)
  • Make the FRR mode the default one when deploying via charts (PR 1931)

Bug Fixes:

  • Charts: remove duplicate relabings and metricRelabelings for speaker (PR 18030)
  • Respect NodeNetworkUnavailable (PR 1759)
  • Verify LB ip and address pool annotations compatibility (PR 1920)

This release includes contributions from Andreas Karis, Chok Yip Lau, Chris Privitere, conblem, cyclinder, dependabot[bot], DerFels, Federico Paolinelli, Fish-pro, Guillaume SMAHA, liornoy, Marcelo Guerrero Viveros, Mathew Peterson, Periyasamy Palanisamy, Tobias Klauser, xin.li, yulng. Thank you!

Version 0.13.9

New Features:

  • IPPool service allocation: it’s now possible to allocate a given IPAddressPool to one or more namespaces and / or services (PR 1693)
  • Annotate the service with the pool used to provide the IP (PR 1637)
  • BGP via VRF support: in FRR mode is possible to establish a BGP session / announce via an interface that has a linux VRF as master (announcement only, the CNI must be vrf aware) PR 1717

Bug Fixes:

  • Controller: reprocess the services when a service is deleted (Issue 1586 PR 1645)
  • Controller: avoid having incompatible services sharing the same ip after restart (Issue 1591, PR 1647)
  • Restrict the RBACS only to the CRDs and webhooks managed by MetalLB (Issue 1641, PR 1658, PR 1786)
  • Skip unnecessary events when processing configuration instead of reprocessing them (Issue 1639 and Issue 1770, PR 1666 and PR 1791)
  • Helm: handle the addressPoolUsage.enabled flag (Issue 1687, PR 1688)
  • Consume the MemberList secret from a file instead of an env variable (PR 1692)
  • Publishing a new service may cause the bgp session to flake (FRR mode only) (Issue 1715, PR 1714)
  • Hide bgp passwords from logs PR 1721
  • L2: avoid one failure on one interface to disable l2 PR 1726, Issue 1727)
  • FRR mode: add a liveness probe to the frr container so it can be restarted upon failures PR 1732
  • Delete the loadbalancers assigned to a service if they are not valid, instead of ignoring the service (Issue 1431, PR 1778)
  • Use the official FRR images from quay instead of dockerhub (PR 1787)

This release includes contributions from Attila Fabian, cyclinder, David Young, Federico Paolinelli, Felix Yan, giuliano, Johanan Liebermann, liornoy, Łukasz Żułnowski, Mitch Ross, mlguerrero12, Periyasamy Palanisamy, tgfree, Tyler Auerbeck, xin.li, yanggang, Yuval Kashtan. Thank you!

Version 0.13.7

New Features:

  • CRDs: add additionalPrinterColumn configuration (PR 1632)

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix service monitor relabelings in Helm charts (PR 1650)
  • Controller readiness probe: restore to metrics endpoint but wait until the webhook is ready to accept requests, remove the “unable to process a request with an unknown content type” log (Issue 1644 PR 1648).

This release includes contributions from Attila Fabian, Tyler Auerbeck, Federico Paolinelli. Thank you!

Version 0.13.6

New Features:

  • Layer2: Announce LB IPs from specific interfaces (PR 1536)
  • Validate MetalLB supports mixed protocol services (Issue 1050 PR 1580)
  • ConfigMapToCRs tool: align docs to match how to use it within the cluster (PR 1595)
  • End to end tests: allow using external containers to execute the tests against a real cluster (PR 1604)
  • Helm: add an option to set resources for speaker sidecar containers (PR 1622)
  • Helm: add an option to set the validating webhooks failure policy (PR 1623)
  • Removed the “experimental” wording from FRR mode declaring it being stable but less battle tested (PR 1636)

Bug Fixes:

  • EndpointSlices detection: use discoveryv1 instead of v1beta1 (PR 1579)
  • Memory leak in FRR mode in cases where the service is getting it’s IP changed by an external entity (Issue 1581 PR 1583)
  • L2: if a service with multiple IPs has an IP that is used only by it, and another used by another service, the watch on the one used by it is not removed when deleting the service (PR 1600)
  • Skip unnecessary node events that don’t affect MetalLB (Issue 1562 PR 1607)
  • Readiness Probe: wait for the webhook to be ready so helm –wait can wait for the webhook to be ready. (Issue 1610 PR 1611)

This release includes contributions from Attila Fabian, chinthiti, Christoph Mewes, cyclinder, danieled-it, David Jeffers, dependabot[bot], Federico Paolinelli, karampok, liornoy, Periyasamy Palanisamy, Peter Pan, witjem, xin.li, Xuebinqi, zhoujiao. Thank you!

Version 0.13.5

New Features:

  • Added namespace validation for custom resources (PR 1523)
  • Helm: added updateStrategy for controller and speakers (PR 1340)
  • Expose the prometheus metrics securely via kube-rbac-proxy (PR 1545)
  • Don’t deploy pod security policy, not supported in k8s 1.25+ (PR 1569)

Bug Fixes:

  • Potential memory leak when receiving updates of the same service multiple times (PR 1570)

This release includes contributions from Federico Paolinelli, Jan Jansen, Magesh Dhasayyan. Thank you!

Version 0.13.4

New Features:

  • Use cosign to sign the images (PR 1437)

Bug Fixes:

  • Change the validating webhook configuration name to metallb-webhook-configuration instead of validating-webhook-configuration (PR 1497)
  • L2 mode error with ipv4 only interfaces with linklocal addresses (Issue 1507 , PR 1506)
  • L2 Mode: get back to announce on interfaces with no IP assigned. Vlans with no IPs should be able to advertise the service (Issue 1511 PR 1516)
  • Add the AvoidBuggyIPs flag to the IPAddressPool CRD. Converting a CIDR to a range comes with limitation related to setting the aggregation length and validating it. (Issue 1495, PR 1515)
  • Add a valid pem format to the CRDs webhooks instead of the empty placeholder. (Issue 1501, Issue 1521, PR 1522)

This release includes contributions from cyclinder, Federico Paolinelli, Periyasamy Palanisamy. Thank you!

Version 0.13.3

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix images on ARM broken in 0.13.2 (PR 1478)
  • Fail the helm release if the deprecated configinline is provided (PR 1485)
  • Helm charts give the permissions to watch communities. This will get rid of the Failed to watch *v1beta1.Community log error. (PR 1487)
  • Helm charts: add the labelselectors to the webhook service. This solves webhook issues when multiple (PR 1487)

This release includes contributions from Federico Paolinelli, Joshua Carnes, Lalit Maganti, Philipp Born. Thank you!

Version 0.13.2

New Features:

  • CRD support! A long awaited feature, MetalLB is now configurable via CRs. On top of that, validating webhooks will ensure the validity of the configuration upfront, without needing to check the logs. (PR #1237, PR #1245) Please note that the ConfigMap configuration is not supported anymore. Check the “Changes in behaviour” section for more details.

  • It’s now possible to choose to advertise addresses in L2 mode, BGP mode, both or just allocate the IP without advertising it.

  • Announcement node selector. It’s possible to choose which nodes to advertise from the IPs coming from a given pool (PR #1302)

  • BGPPeer selector. For any IP allocated from a given IPAddressPool, it is possible to choose the subset of BGPPeers we want to advertise that IP to (PR #1171).

  • Kustomize configuration overlays. We now provide various overlays that implement different configuration degrees (as opposed to having) one single manifest. (PR #1254)

  • It’s now possible to store BGP passwords as secrets (as an alternative to plain text passwords). (PR #1264).

  • LoadBalancerClass support: it’s possible to have MetalLB listen only to services with the provided load balancer class to comply with kubernetes loadbalancer class. (PR 1417).

  • Helm Charts: optional annotations for PodMonitors and PrometheusRules (PR 1407)

  • Multiprotocol BGP support: it’s possible to expose ipv4 addresses via a router connected via ipv6 and viceversa. It was already possible with FRR mode in the v0.12.x version, but now the feature is covered by tests too (PR 1444).

Changes in behavior:

  • the biggest change is the introduction of CRDs and removing support for the configuration via ConfigMap. In order to ease the transition to the new configuration, we provide a conversion tool from ConfigMap to resources (see the “Backward compatibility” section from the main page).

  • the internal architecture was radically changed in order to accommodate CRDs, so please do not hesitate to file an issue.

  • The AvoidBuggyIPs flag was removed in order to reduce the api surface a bit. The same result can be achieved using ranges of IPs instead of the CIDR annotation.

  • The metallb images from dockerhub are deprecated. From this release, only the images on quay.io will be supported and updated. The official images can be found under the quay.io metallb organization.

Bug Fixes:

  • When sharing IPs, fail instead of silently assign a new IP when a service is changed and becomes incompatible because of the sharing key (PR #1230)

  • Restore compatibility with versions prior to 1.19 (PR #1238)

  • Set BGP origin code in igp (Native mode) (PR #1242)

  • Remove the endpoint slices deprecation log (PR #1020)

  • L2: skip interfaces that do have an assigned IP (PR #1347)

  • Logging: Avoid printing microseconds, fix the calling site for each log (PR #1351)

  • IPV6 / FRR: fix single hop ebgp next hop tracking (PR #1367)

  • Restore FRR to be pulled from dockerhub to support ARM (PR #1258)

  • A race condition happening when the speaker container was slower than the frr one was fixed (PR 1463)

This release includes contributions from Andrea Panattoni, Carlos Goncalves, Federico Paolinelli, jay vyas, Joshua Carnes, liornoy, Mani Kanth, manu, Mateusz Gozdek, Mathieu Parent, Matt Layher, mkeppel@solvinity.com, Mohamed Mahmoud, Ori Braunshtein, Periyasamy Palanisamy, Rodrigo Campos, Sabina Aledort, Scott Laird, Stefan Coetzee, Tyler Auerbeck, zhoujiao. Thank you!

Version 0.12.1

Bug Fixes:

  • (helm chart) FRR mode disabled by default as the FRR mode is still experimental (can be optionally enabled). (PR #1222)

Version 0.12.0

New Features:

  • Experimental FRR mode is now available. In this mode, the BGP stack is handled by a FRR container in place of the native BGP implementation. This offers additional capabilities such as IPv6 BGP announcement and BFD support. See the installation section on how to enable it. (PR #832, PR #935, PR #958, PR #1014 and others)

  • Dual stack services are now supported. L2 works out of the box, BGP requires the FRR mode because of missing IPv6 support in the native implementation. (PR #1065)

  • In FRR mode, it is possible to have a BGP session paired with a BFD session for quicker path failure detection. (PR #927) (PR #967)

  • A new manifest (manifests/metallb-frr.yaml) is available to deploy metallb in FRR mode (PR #1014)

  • (helm chart) Add support for deploying MetalLB in FRR mode. (PR #1073)

  • (helm chart) Allow specification of priorityClassName for speaker and controller. (PR #1099)

Changes in behavior:

  • The new FRR mode comes with limitations, compared to the native implementation. The most notable are:

    • It is not allowed to have different peers sharing the same ip address but different ports
    • It is not allowed to have different routerID or different myAsn for different peers. It is allowed to override the routerID and/or myAsn, but the value must be the same for all the peers.
    • In case the BGP peer is multiple hops away from the nodes, the new ebgp-multihop flag must be set.

  • When switching to FRR mode, the FRR image will required to be downloaded, which may require a longer rollout time than usual. Also, please note that the migration path from native BGP to FRR was not explicitly tested.

Bug Fixes:

  • If a configmap is marked as stale because removing an pool used by a service, metallb tries to reprocess it periodically until the service is deleted or changed. (PR #1028, PR #1166)

  • Controller panic when updating the address pool of a service and specifying spec.loadBalancerIP from the new address pool (PR #1168)

Version 0.11.0

New Features:

  • Leveled logging is now supported. You can set --log-level flag to one of all, debug, info, warn, error or none to filter produced logs by level. The default value is set to info on both helm charts and k8s manifests. (PR #895)

  • MetalLB previously required the speaker to run on the same node as a pod backing a LoadBalancer, even when the ExternalTrafficPolicy was set to cluster. You may now run the MetalLB speaker on a subset of nodes, and the LoadBalancer will work for the cluster policy, regardless of where the endpoints are located. (PR #976)

  • It is now possible to configure the source address used for BGP sessions. (PR #902)

  • A new config flag has been added to allow disabling the use of Kubernetes EndpointSlices. (PR #937)

  • A new manifest, prometheus-operator.yaml is now included with MetalLB to help set up the resources necessary to allow Prometheus to gather metrics from the MetalLB services. (PR #960)

  • (helm chart) Add support for specifying additional labels for PodMonitor and PrometheusRule resources. This is needed when using the Prometheus operator and have it configured to use PodMonitors and PrometheusRules that are using a specific label. (PR #886)

Changes in behavior:

  • With the newly introduced leveled logging support, the default value for the --log-level is set to info on both helm charts and k8s manifests. This will produce fewer logs compared to the previous releases, since many debug level logs will be filtered out. You can preserve the old verbosity by editing the k8s manifests and setting the argument --log-level=all for both the controller and speaker when installing using manifests, or by overriding helm values controller.logLevel=all and speaker.logLevel=all when installing with Helm. (PR #895)

  • The L2 node allocation logic is now using the LoadBalancer IP and not the service name. This means that the node associated to a given service may change across releases. This would affect established connections as a new GARP will sent out to announce the IP belonging to the new node. (PR #976)

Bug Fixes:

  • L2 mode now allows to announce from nodes where the speaker is not running from in case of ExternalTrafficPolicy = Cluster. The association of the node to the service is done via the LoadBalancerIP, avoiding scenarios where two services sharing the same IP are announced from different nodes. (Issue #968) (Issue #558) (Issue #315)

  • Multi-arch images have been fixed to ensure the included busybox is based on the target platform architecture instead of the build platform architecture. Previously this made debugging these running containers more difficult as the included tools were not usable. (Issue #618)

This release includes contributions from alphabet5, Andrea Panattoni, Brian_P, Carlos Goncalves, Federico Paolinelli, Graeme Lawes, HeroCC, Ian Roberts, Lior Noy, Marco Geri, Mark Gray, Matthias Linhuber, Mohamed S. Mahmoud, Ori Braunshtein, Periyasamy Palanisamy, Pumba98, rata, Russell Bryant, Sabina Aledort, Shivamani Patil, Tyler Auerbeck, Viktor Oreshkin. Thank you!

Version 0.10.3

Bug Fixes:

  • Add fsGroup to the MetalLB controller deployment to address compatibility with Kubernetes 1.21 and later. See Kubernetes issue #70679. This ensures the MetalLB controller can read the service account token volume. (Issue #890)

  • helm: fix validation of imagePullSecrets (Issue #897)

  • Resolve issue in EndpointSlice support that caused excessive log spam. (Issue #899) (Issue #901) (Issue #978)

  • layer2: Fix a race condition when sending gratuitous ARP or NDP messages where an error on a removed interface would cause MetalLB to skip sending the same message out on the rest of the list of interfaces. (Issue #681)

Version 0.10.2

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix a missing RBAC update in the manifests used by the helm chart. (Issue #878)

Version 0.10.1

Bug Fixes:

  • Fix the images in manifests/metallb.yaml to refer to the images for the release tag instead of the main branch. (Issue #874)

Version 0.10.0

New Features:

  • Helm Charts are now provided. You should be able to migrate from Bitnami Charts to MetalLB Charts by just changing the repo and upgrading. For more details, see the installation documentation.

  • Version 0.9.x required the creation of a Secret called memberlist. This Secret is now automatically created by the MetalLB controller if it does not already exist. To use this feature you must set the new ml-secret-name and deployment options or METALLB_ML_SECRET_NAME and METALLB_DEPLOYMENT environment variables. This is already done in the manifests provided with this release.

  • Endpoint Slices support. Endpoint slices are the proposed and more scalable way introduced in k8s to find services endpoints. From this version, MetalLB checks for EndpointSlices availability and uses them, otherwise it backs up to endpoints.

Changes in behavior:

  • The port option to the speaker, which is the prometheus metrics port, now defaults to port 7472. This was already the default in the manifests included with MetalLB, but the binary itself previously defaulted to port 80.

  • The config-ns option of both the controller and the speaker and the ml-namespace option and METALLB_ML_NAMESPACE environment variable of the speaker are replaced by the namespace option or the METALLB_NAMESPACE environment variable. If not set the namespace is read from /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/namespace.

This release includes contributions from Adit Sachde, Adrian Goins, Andrew Grosser, Brian Topping, Chance Carey, Chris Tarazi, Damien TOURDE, David Anderson, Dax McDonald, dougbtv, Etienne Champetier, Federico Paolinelli, Graeme Lawes, Henry-Kim-Youngwoo, Igal Serban, Jan Krcmar, JinLin Fu, Johannes Liebermann, Jumpy Squirrel, Lars Ekman, Leroy Shirto, Mark Gray, NorthFuture, Oleg Mayko, Reinier Schoof, Rodrigo Campos, Russell Bryant, Sebastien Dionne, Stefan Lasiewski, Steven Follis, sumarsono, Thorsten Schifferdecker, toby cabot, Tomofumi Hayashi, Tony Perez, and Yuan Liu. Thank you!

Version 0.9.6

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix nodeAssigned event on k8s >= 1.20 (#812).

This release includes contributions from Lars Ekman, Rodrigo Campos, Russell Bryant and Stefan Lasiewski. Thanks for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.9.5

Documentation for this release

New features:

  • Update manifests/metallb.yaml for kubernetes v1.19 (#744).

Bugfixes:

  • Update repository URLs (#688).

This release includes contributions from Adit Sachde and Jan Krcmar. Thanks for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.9.4

Documentation for this release

New features:

  • Make Memberlist bind port configurable (#582).

Bugfixes:

  • Improve speaker log output (#587).
  • Add “other” exec permission to binaries in Docker images (#644).
  • Fix wrong behavior of the addresses_in_use_total metric under certain conditions (#627).
  • Layer 2: Fix Memberlist convergence following a network partition (#662).
  • Layer 2: Send gratuitous ARP / unsolicited NDP neighbor advertisements following a network partition (#736).

This release includes contributions from Andrew Grosser, Chance Carey, Damien TOURDE, Etienne Champetier, Johannes Liebermann, Jumpy Squirrel, Lars Ekman, Rodrigo Campos, Russell Bryant, Sebastien Dionne, Steven Follis, sumarsono Thorsten Schifferdecker, toby cabot and Yuan Liu. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.9.3

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix manifests to use container image version v0.9.3 instead of main. Users of v0.9.2 are encouraged to upgrade, as manifests included in that release use an incorrect container image version. Those two images happen to match now but, as development continues on main branch, they will differ.

  • Update installation procedure to create the namespace first (#557).

This release includes contributions from Henry-Kim-Youngwoo, Oleg Mayko and Rodrigo Campos. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.9.2

Documentation for this release

New features:

  • Dramatically reduce dead node detection time when using Layer 2 mode (#527). This is improvement closes the long standing issue #298 that has been a common pain point for users using Layer 2 mode. This feature is enabled by default. You can disable it by simply changing the speaker Daemonset manifest and remove the METALLB_ML_BIND_ADDR environment variable. Also, you can verify the old method is being used by checking the speaker log on startup to contain: Not starting fast dead node detection (MemberList). If not shown, the new fast node detection method is being used.

  • Allow spaces in address pool IP ranges (#499).

Action required:

  • Layer 2 users by default will use a new algorithm to detect dead nodes (time is significantly reduced). If you want to continue with the old way, see the New features section to see how to opt-out. If you find any problems with the new algorithm, as usual, please open an issue.

Bug fixes:

  • Allow kustomize to change namespace MetalLB runs (#516).
  • Fix layer2 not sending ARP messages when IP changes (#520). Fixes #471.
  • Fix to properly expose address_total Prometheus metric (#518).
  • Add note in installation process about strictARP when using kube-proxy in IPVS mode (#507).
  • Support older devices that might not support RFC4893 (#491).

This release includes contributions from binoue, David Anderson, dulltz, Etienne Champetier, Gary Richards, Jean-Philippe Evrard, Johan Fleury, k2mahajan, Knic Knic, kvaps, Lars Ekman, masa213f, remche, Rickard von Essen, Rui Lopes, Serge Bazanski, Spence. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Versions 0.9.0 and 0.9.1

0.9.0 and 0.9.1 were never released, due to a bug that prevented building Docker images. 0.9.2 is the first “real” release of the 0.9.x branch.

Version 0.8.3

Documentation for this release

New features:

  • The manifests directory now has a kustomize file, which allows using kustomize to install and configure MetalLB.

This release includes contributions from Rémi Cailletaud.

Version 0.8.2

Documentation for this release

Action required:

  • The MetalLB Helm chart in the official helm repository is no longer a supported installation method.

Bugfixes:

  • Fix layer2 node selection when healthy and unhealthy replicas are colocated on a single node. (#474)

This release includes contributions from David Anderson and Gary Richards.

Version 0.8.1

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix the apiGroup for PodSecurityPolicy, for compatibility with Kubernetes 1.16. (#458).
  • Fix speaker posting events with an empty string as the announcing node name. (#456).
  • Fix RBAC permissions on speaker, to allow it to post events to all namespaces. (#455).

This release includes contributions from David Anderson.

Version 0.8.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if updating from 0.7.x:

  • The speaker DaemonSet now specifies a toleration to run on Kubernetes control plane nodes that have the standard, unfortunately named “master” taint. If you don’t want MetalLB to run on control plane nodes, you need to remove that toleration from the manifest.
  • The manifest and Helm chart both now specify a PodSecurityPolicy allowing the speaker DaemonSet to request the elevated privileges it needs. If your cluster enforces pod security policies, you should review the provided policy before deploying it.
  • The speaker defaults to only offering its Prometheus metrics on the node IP as registered in Kubernetes (i.e. the IP you see in kubectl get nodes -owide). To revert to the previous behavior of offering metrics on all interfaces, remove the METALLB_HOST environment variable from the manifest.

New features:

  • The manifest and Helm chart now define a PodSecurityPolicy for the MetalLB speaker, granting it the necessary privileges for it to function. This should make MetalLB work out of the box in clusters with pod security policies enforced.
  • On Windows/Linux hybrid Kubernetes clusters, MetalLB constrains itself to run only on linux nodes (via a nodeSelector).
  • The MetalLB speaker now tolerates running on Kubernetes control plane nodes. This means that services whose pods run only on control plane nodes (e.g. the Kubernetes dashboard, in some setups) are now reachable.
  • MetalLB withdraws BGP announcements entirely for services with no healthy pods. This enables anycast geo-redundancy by advertising the same IP from multiple Kubernetes clusters. (#312)
  • The speaker only exposes its Prometheus metrics port on the node IP registered with Kubernetes, rather than on all interfaces. This should reduce the risk of exposure for clusters where nodes have separate public and private interfaces.
  • The website has updated compatibility grids for both Kubernetes network addons and cloud providers, listing known issues and configuration tips.
  • MetalLB now publishes a Kubernetes event to a service, indicating which nodes are announcing that service. This makes it much easier to determine how traffic is flowing. (#430)
  • The manifest and Helm chart now use the apps/v1 version of Deployment and DaemonSet, rather than the obsolete extensions/v1beta1.

Bugfixes:

  • Fix address allocation in cases where no addresses were available at service creation, but the deletion of another service subsequently makes one available. (#413)
  • Fix allocation not updating when the address pool annotation changes. (#448).
  • Fix periodic crashes due to glog trying to write to disk despite explicit instructions to the contrary. (#427)
  • Fix spec.loadBalancerIP validation on IPv6 clusters. (#301)
  • Fix BGP Router ID selection on v6 BGP sessions.
  • Fix handling of IPv6 addresses in the BGP connection establishment logic.
  • Generate deterministically pseudorandom BGP router IDs in IPv6-only clusters.
  • Fix incorrect ARP/NDP responses on bonded interfaces. (#349)
  • Fix ARP/NDP responses sent on interfaces with the NOARP flag. (#351)
  • Update MetalLB logs on the website to the new structured format. (#275)

This release includes contributions from Alex Lovell-Troy, Antonio Ojea, aojeagarcia, Ashley Dumaine, Brian, Brian Topping, David Anderson, Eduardo Minguez Perez, Elan Hasson, Irit Goihman, Ivan Kurnosov, Jeff Kolb, johnl, Jordan Neufeld, kvaps, Lars Ekman, Matt Sharpe, Maxime Guyot, Miek Gieben, Niklas Voss, Oilbeater, remche, Rodrigo Campos, Sergey Anisimov, Stephan Fudeus, Steven Beverly, stokbaek and till. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.7.3

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix BGP announcement refcounting when using shared IPs. (#295)

Version 0.7.2

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix gratuitous ARP and NDP announcements on IP failover. (#291)
  • Fix BGP dialing on Arm64, by using x/sys/unix instead of the syscall package. (#289)

Version 0.7.1

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Actually allow layer2 mode to use the Local traffic policy. Oops. (#279)

Version 0.7.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if updating from 0.6.x:

  • MetalLB no longer does leader election. After upgrading to 0.7, you can delete a number of k8s resources associated with that. This is just a cleanup, nothing bad happens if you leave the resources orphaned in your cluster. Depending on your installation method, some of these may have already been cleaned up for you.
    • kubectl delete -nmetallb-system endpoints metallb-speaker
    • kubectl delete -nmetallb-system rolebinding leader-election
    • kubectl delete -nmetallb-system role leader-election

New features:

  • Layer2 mode now supports externalTrafficPolicy=Local, meaning layer2 services can see the true client source IP. (#257)
  • Layer2 mode now selects leader nodes on a per-service level, instead of using a single leader node for all services in the cluster. If you have many services, this change spreads the load of handling incoming traffic across more than one machine. (#195)
  • MetalLB’s maturity has upgraded from alpha to beta! Mostly this just reflects the increased confidence in the code from the larger userbase, and adds some guarantees around graceful upgrades from one version to the next.

Bugfixes:

  • Speaker no longer sends localpref over eBGP sessions (#266)

This release includes contributions from Baul, David Anderson, Ryan Roemmich, Sanjeev Rampal, and Steve Sloka. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.6.2

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Fix nil pointer deref crash on BGP peers that reject MetalLB’s OPEN message too promptly (#250)

Version 0.6.1

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

  • Speaker no longer goes into a tight CPU-burning loop when pods are deleted on the node. (#246)

Version 0.6.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if upgrading from 0.5.x:

  • As documented in the 0.5.0 release notes, several deprecated fields have been removed from the configuration. If you didn’t update your configurations for 0.5, you may need to make the following changes:
    • Rename the cidr field of address pools to addresses
    • Rename protocol: arp and protocol: ndp to protocol: layer2
    • Replace arp-network statements with a range-based IP allocation

New features:

  • You can now colocate multiple services on a single IP address, using annotations on the Service objects. See the IP sharing documentation for instructions and caveats. (#121)
  • Layer 2 mode now listens on all interfaces for ARP and NDP requests, not just the interface used for communication by Kubernetes components. (#165)
  • MetalLB now uses structured logging instead of Google’s glog package. Logging events are written to standard output as a series of JSON objects suitable for collection by centralized logging systems. (#189)
  • BGP connections can now specify a password for TCP MD5 secured BGP sessions. (#215)
  • MetalLB is now available as a Helm package in the “stable” Helm repository. Note that, due to code review delay, it may take several days after a release before the Helm package is updated. (#177)

Bugfixes:

  • Correctly use AS_SEQUENCE in eBGP session messages, rather than AS_SET (#225)

This release includes contributions from David Anderson, ghorofamike, Serguei Bezverkhi, and Zsombor Welker. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.5.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if upgrading from 0.4.x:

  • The cidr field of address pools in the configuration file has been renamed to addresses. MetalLB 0.5 understands both cidr and addresses, but in 0.6 it will only understand addresses, so please update now.
  • The arp and ndp protocols have been replaced by a unified layer2 protocol. MetalLB 0.5 understands both the old and new names, but 0.6 will only understand layer2, so please update now.
  • Remove any arp-network entries from your configuration. If your address pool overlaps with the ethernet network or broadcast addresses for your LAN, use IP range notation (see new features) to exclude them from your address pool.
  • The router IDs used on BGP sessions may change in this version, in clusters where nodes have multiple IP addresses. If your BGP infrastructure monitors or enforces specific router IDs for peers, you may need to update those systems to match new router IDs.
  • The Prometheus metrics for ARP and NDP traffic have been merged. Instead of arp_* and ndp_* metrics, there is now single set of layer2_* metrics, in which the ip label can be IPv4 or IPv6.

New features:

  • ARP and NDP modes have been replaced by a single “layer 2” mode, indicated by protocol: layer2 in the configuration file. Layer 2 mode uses ARP and NDP under the hood, but having a single protocol name makes it easier to build protocol-agnostic configuration templates.
  • You can give addresses to MetalLB using a simple IP range notation, in addition to CIDR prefixes. For example, 192.168.0.0-192.168.0.255 is equivalent to 192.168.0.0/24. This makes it much easier to allocate IP ranges that don’t fall cleanly on CIDR prefix boundaries.
  • BGP mode supports nodes with multiple interfaces and IP addresses (#182). Previously, MetalLB could only establish working BGP sessions on the node’s “primary” interface, i.e. the one that owned the IP that Kubernetes uses to identify the node. Now, peerings may be established via any interface on the nodes, and traffic will flow in the expected manner.

Bugfixes:

Version 0.4.6

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

Version 0.4.5

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

Version 0.4.4

Documentation for this release

This was a broken attempt to fix the same bugs as 0.4.5. You should not use this version.

Version 0.4.3

Documentation for this release

Changes:

  • Make the configmap’s namespace and name configurable via flags, for Helm upstreaming.

Version 0.4.2

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

Version 0.4.1

Documentation for this release

Bugfixes:

Version 0.4.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if upgrading from 0.3.x:

  • MetalLB’s use of Kubernetes labels has changed slightly to conform to Kubernetes best practices. If you were using a label match on app: controller or app: speaker Kubernetes labels to find MetalLB objects, you should now match on a combination of app: metallb, app.kubernetes.io/component: controller or app.kubernetes.io/component: speaker, depending on what objects you want to select.
  • RBAC rules have changed, and now allow the MetalLB speaker to list and watch Node objects. If you are not installing MetalLB via the provided manifest, you will need to make this change by hand.
  • If you want to switch to using Helm to manage your MetalLB installation, you must first uninstall the manifest-based version, with kubectl delete -f metallb.yaml.

New features:

  • Initial IPv6 support! The ndp protocol allows v6 Kubernetes clusters to advertise their services using the Neighbor Discovery Protocol, IPv6’s analog to ARP. If you have an IPv6 Kubernetes cluster, please try it out and file bugs!
  • BGP peers now have a node selector. You can use this to integrate MetalLB into more complex cluster network topologies.
  • MetalLB now has a Helm chart. If you use Helm on your cluster, this should make it easier to track and manage your MetalLB installation. The chart will be submitted for inclusion in the main Helm stable repository shortly after the release is finalized. Use of Helm is optional, installing the manifest directly is still fully supported.

Other improvements:

  • MetalLB now backs off on failing BGP connections, to avoid flooding logs with failures
  • ARP mode should be a little more interoperable with clients, and failover should be a little faster, thanks to tweaks to its advertisement logic.
  • ARP and NDP modes export Prometheus metrics for requests received, responses sent, and failover-related transmissions. This brings them up to “monitoring parity” with BGP mode.
  • Binary internals were refactored to share more common code. This should reduce the amount of visual noise in the logs.

This release includes contributions from Oga Ajima, David Anderson, Matt Layher, John Marcou, Paweł Prażak, and Hugo Slabbert. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.3.1

Documentation for this release

Fixes a couple of embarrassing bugs that sneaked into 0.3.

Bugfixes:

  • Revert to using apps/v1beta2 instead of apps/v1 for MetalLB’s Deployment and Daemonset, to remain compatible with Kubernetes 1.8.
  • Create the metallb-system namespace when installing test-bgp-router.
  • Disable BIRD in test-bgp-router. Bird got updated to 2.0, and the integration with test-bgp-router needs some reworking.

Version 0.3.0

Documentation for this release

Action required if upgrading from 0.2.x:

  • The bgp-speaker DaemonSet has been renamed to just speaker. Before applying the manifest for 0.3.0, delete the old daemonset with kubectl delete -n metallb-system ds/bgp-speaker. This will take down your load balancers until you deploy the new DaemonSet.
  • The configuration file format has changed in a few backwards-incompatible ways. You need to update your ConfigMap by hand:
    • Each address-pool must now have a protocol field, to select between ARP and BGP mode. For your existing configurations, add protocol: bgp to each address pool definition.
    • The advertisements field of address-pool has been renamed to bgp-advertisements, and is now optional. If you don’t need any special advertisement settings, you can remove the section entirely, and MetalLB will use a reasonable default.
    • The communities section has been renamed to bgp-communities.

New features:

  • MetalLB now supports ARP advertisement, enabled by setting protocol: arp on an address pool. ARP mode does not require any special network equipment, and minimal configuration. You can follow the ARP mode tutorial to get started. There is also a page about ARP mode’s behavior and tradeoffs, and documentation on configuring ARP mode.
  • The container images are now multi-architecture images. MetalLB now supports running on all supported Kubernetes architectures: amd64, arm, arm64, ppc64le, and s390x.
  • You can now disable automatic address allocation on address pools, if you want to have manual control over the use of some addresses.
  • MetalLB pods now come with Prometheus scrape annotations. If you’ve configured your Prometheus-on-Kubernetes to automatically discover monitorable pods, MetalLB will be discovered and scraped automatically. For more advanced monitoring needs, the Prometheus Operator supports more flexible monitoring configurations in a Kubernetes-native way.
  • We’ve documented how to Integrate with the Romana networking system, so that you can use MetalLB alongside Romana’s BGP route publishing.
  • The website got a makeover, to accommodate the growing amount of documentation in a discoverable way.

This release includes contributions from David Anderson, Charles Eckman, Miek Gieben, Matt Layher, Xavier Naveira, Marcus Söderberg, Kouhei Ueno. Thanks to all of them for making MetalLB better!

Version 0.2.1

Documentation for this release

Notable fixes:

  • MetalLB unable to start because Kubernetes cannot verify that “nobody” is a non-root user (#85)

Version 0.2.0

Documentation for this release

Major themes for this version are: improved BGP interoperability, vastly increased test coverage, and improved documentation structure and accessibility.

Notable features:

  • This website! It replaces a loose set of markdown files, and hopefully makes MetalLB more accessible.
  • The BGP speaker now speaks Multiprotocol BGP (RFC 4760). While we still only support IPv4 service addresses, speaking Multiprotocol BGP is a requirement to successfully interoperate with several popular BGP stacks. In particular, this makes MetalLB compatible with Quagga and Ubiquiti’s EdgeRouter and Unifi product lines.
  • The development workflow with Minikube now works with Docker for Mac, allowing mac users to hack on MetalLB. See the hacking documentation for the required additional setup.

Notable fixes:

  • Handle multiple BGP peers properly. Previously, bgp-speaker mistakenly made all its connections to the last defined peer, ignoring the others.
  • Fix a startup race condition where MetalLB might never allocate an IP for some services.
  • Test coverage is above 90% for almost all packages, up from ~0% previously.
  • Fix yaml indentation in the MetalLB manifests.

Version 0.1.0

Documentation for this release

This was the first tagged version of MetalLB. Its changelog is effectively “MetalLB now exists, where previously it did not.”