Calico and MetalLB, where to configure BGP advertising?
Francis Augusto Medeiros
The thing is, I've been using Calico and MetalLB for a few days now on my cluster. While it is working fine, I've seen on MetalLB documentation that we should not configure a BGP advertisement on MetalLB when using Calico. I didn't know that, and had BGP advertisement configured on MetalLB. Note that, when I installed Calico, I didn't do any configuration - it just worked out of the box, and I see my nodes talking to each other via BGP.
I see that, when I remove BGP advertisement on MetalLB, I don't get traffic anymore. Is there a downside of keeping BGP advertisement configured on metallb, as it is now, or should I change CNI or configure BGP in Calico? Or, in other words, am I missing something?
On my router, I see that a Load Balance IP address was added to my BGP routes, where the next hop is my first worker node. Is it a sign that it is working, or should I have more routes added?
Best,
Francis
Skyler Mäntysaari
It's usually recommended to use Calico's own External IP feature when using that as the CNI rather than MetalLB at all.
The reason why you cannot have both MetalLB and Calico BGP peering with your router is due to the port being already used up.
This is the manifest I used when I last used Calico: https://gist.github.com/samip5/f078c4d4a80193e656a8f13d24945727 (keep in mind, it's probably out of date).
I also had to manually create the IP pools with calico's cli utility and the BGP configuration.
Best,
Skyler Mäntysaari