<p>When using an external load balancer with istio ingress gateways (multiple replicas spread across different nodes), how does it identify which istio ingress gateway it can possibly hit i.e. I can manually access nodeip:nodeport/endpoint for any node manually but how is an external load balancer expected to know all nodes.</p>

<p>Is this manually configured or does the load balancer consume this info from an API
Is there a recommended strategy for bypassing an external load balancer eg. roundrobin across a DNS which is aware of the node ip / port ?</p>

<p>The root of this question is - how do we avoid a single point of failure . Using multiple istio ingress gateway replicas achieves this in istio but then the the external load balancer / load balancer cluster needs to know the replicas . Is this automated or a manual config or is there a single virtual endpoint that the external load balancer hits?</p>

<p>External load balancers are generally configured to do health check on your set of nodes (over <code>/healthz</code> endpoint or some other method), and balance the incoming traffic using an LB algorithm, by sending the packets it receives to <strong>one of the healthy nodes over the service's NodePort</strong>. </p>

<p>In fact, that's mostly the reason why NodePort type services exist in the first place - they don't have much of an usage by themselves, but they are the intermediate steps between modes <code>LoadBalancer</code> and <code>ClusterIP</code>.</p>

<p>How does the load balancer know about the nodes? It heavily depends on the load balancer. As an example, if you use <a href="https://metallb.universe.tf/concepts/bgp/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MetalLB</a> in BGP mode, you need to add your nodes as peers to your external BGP router (either manually or in an automated way). MetalLB takes care of advertising the IPs of the LoadBalancer type services to the router. This means, that router effectively becomes the load balancer of your cluster.</p>

<p>There are also a number of enterprise-grade commercial Kubernetes load balancers out there, such as F5 Big-IP.</p>
