Release Notes

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  • The arp and ndp protocols have been replaced by a unified layer2 protocol.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  • ARP and NDP modes have been replaced by a single “layer 2” mode, indicated by protocol: layer2 in the configuration file.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, component: controller or 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.”