Traditional hardware load balancers introduce significant cost, complexity, and scalability challenges in Kubernetes environments. In this talk, we introduce an eBPF-based approach to Software-Defined Load Balancing (SD-LB) that eliminates the need for external hardware appliances while ensuring high availability and failover capabilities.

We will explore the role of eBPF in Kubernetes networking, focusing on its integration with kube-proxy and how externalTrafficPolicy—powered by an eBPF agent—can enable seamless failover, particularly in NodePort and anycast service scenarios.

Through a live demonstration and code walkthrough, we will showcase how a request sent to a Pod on one node can fail over to another node advertising the same IP—without requiring traditional hardware load balancers. We will also cover Direct Server Return (DSR) and discuss strategies to scale eBPF-based solutions for handling high ingress traffic.