MetalLB is a Kubernetes-native load balancer for bare-metal clusters. Two cooperating workloads implement the system: a cluster-scoped controller that allocates IP addresses from CRD-defined IPAddressPools and writes Service status updates, and a DaemonSet of speaker pods on each node that announce assigned IPs to the physical network. Announcement is either BGP (via a from-scratch native Go BGP stack, a deprecated FRR sidecar mode, or the newer FRR-K8s API that generates FRRConfiguration CRs) or Layer2 (ARP/NDP responders with memberlist-based fast failover detection and deterministic speaker election). All user configuration flows through CRDs — IPAddressPool, BGPPeer, BGPAdvertisement, L2Advertisement, Community, BFDProfile, and ConfigurationState — validated by admission webhooks, with a configmaptocrs tool migrating legacy ConfigMap configuration to the CRD model. The controller/speaker split, a listener abstraction that delivers config changes to protocol handlers, and a common bgp.Session interface across backends give the architecture a clean, modular shape.
Keepalived is a production-grade Linux daemon for high-availability and load balancing. It implements VRRP v2/v3 for router failover, integrates with the Linux Virtual Server (IPVS) kernel module for Layer 4 load balancing, and includes a suite of health checkers (HTTP, SSL, TCP, UDP, SMTP, DNS, PING, MISC) plus BFD for fast failure detection. The architecture is multi-process: a parent process manages dedicated children for VRRP, checkers, and BFD, coordinating reloads and termination via signals and eventfd. It deeply interacts with the Linux kernel through netlink, nftables/iptables, raw sockets, and proc connector, and exposes operational interfaces via SNMP, D-Bus, JSON state dumps, SMTP alerts, and notification scripts. The codebase is written in C with careful attention to Linux-specific features, including network namespaces, VRFs, VMAC/macvlan, and multicast group handling. It is a mature, widely deployed critical infrastructure component rather than a research artifact or library.