Load balancing strategies in Kubernetes: L4 round robin, L7 round robin, ring hash, and more

Load balancing in Kubernetes is crucial for maximizing scalability and availability by efficiently distributing network traffic among multiple backend services. There are several strategies to choose from, each with different trade-offs. L4 round robin load balancing uses kube-proxy and IPVS for routing at the TCP level, while L7 round robin load balancing utilizes an API Gateway like Ambassador Edge Stack for more fair distribution of requests. Ring hash and Maglev are consistent hashing algorithms that use a hashing algorithm to send all requests from a given client to the same Pod. Understanding these strategies is essential for optimizing Kubernetes load balancing.