Understanding Kubernetes: Part 16 -Load Balancer Service

If you’ve been following our Kubernetes series 2025, welcome back! For new readers, check out Part 14: Understanding Kubernetes: NodePort Service

📖 Not a Medium member? No worries! Here’s the free link: Part 16 — Load Balancer Service

LoadBalancer Service in Kubernetes

A LoadBalancer Service in Kubernetes provides an external IP address to expose your application to the internet. It automatically provisions an external load balancer, such as AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) or Google Cloud Load Balancer, to distribute incoming traffic across the backend Pods. This type of Service is ideal for production environments where high availability and scalability are required.

Example Use Case:

Suppose you have a web application that needs to be accessible globally with automatic traffic distribution. A LoadBalancer Service allows traffic to be routed from an externally provisioned IP address to the application’s backend Pods inside the cluster.

Capabilities:

• Automatic Load Balancing: Distributes incoming traffic across multiple Pods to ensure high availability.
• Cloud Integration: Works with cloud provider load balancers (AWS ELB, GCP…