Provides an overview of how the Unified Load Balancer (ULB) manages traffic distribution across worker nodes and backend pods to ensure network reliability.
The Unified Load Balancer (ULB) is a Cisco proprietary network function that distributes incoming network traffic equally across all worker nodes. It ensures high availability and reliability across network infrastructures by maintaining consistent service IP addresses for ingress and egress traffic.
Key benefits
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Traffic management: Prevents bottlenecks by balancing traffic across multiple servers.
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Scalability: Supports horizontal scaling to handle increased traffic loads.
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Performance: Reduces latency through Direct Server Response (DSR).
How the ULB works
Describes the stages of the random load balancer algorithm used by the ULB to distribute incoming requests to backend servers.
ULB pod availability and configuration reconciliation
This topic describes how the system maintains traffic continuity and manages configuration updates during periods of ULB pod unavailability. It outlines how existing traffic remains unaffected while the datapath is active, and explains the reconciliation process that ensures configuration changes are applied once the ULB pods return to service.