laik/lb-from-scratch

A very basic eBPF Load Balancer in a few lines of C

An eBPF Load Balancer from scratch

As seen at eBPF Summit 2021. This is not production ready :-)

This uses libbpf as a git submodule. If you clone this repo you'll need to run git submodule init and git submodule update to get your copy of that repo.

Load Balancer container

In my demo I'm running all the components as containers. For the Load Balancer component itself I created an image locally by running an ubuntu container and adding dependencies so that it can compile the eBPF code:

sudo apt install clang llvm libelf-dev libpcap-dev gcc-multilib build-essential make

Save this image off with docker commit <running container> ubuntu-working. Running it as privileged gives it permissions to load eBPF programs:

docker run --rm -it -v ~/lb-from-scratch:/lb-from-scratch --privileged -h lb --name lb --env TERM=xterm-color ubuntu-working

Exec into that container, cd lb-from-scratch and then make should build and install the load balancer onto the eth0 interface for that container.

Demo containers

Here's how I started the containers for the two backends and the client:

docker run -d --rm --name backend-A -h backend-A --env TERM=xterm-color nginxdemos/hello:plain-text
docker run -d --rm --name backend-B -h backend-B --env TERM=xterm-color nginxdemos/hello:plain-text
docker run --rm -it -h client --name client --env TERM=xterm-color ubuntu

Exec into one of the backends and install tcpdump with apk add tcpdump if you want to see incoming traffic there.

Run something on the host that tails the output from BPF trace (for example, my hello world eBPF beginners examples)

IP addresses

The IP addresses for the client, load balancer and two backends are hard-coded at the top of the .c file. You'll likely need to change these to match the addresses assigned to the containers you run.