We are proud to announce KubeLB 1.2! This release marks a new era for KubeLB, expanding its reach beyond Kubernetes with a powerful new CLI, embracing the future of MLOps with AI Gateway integration, and fundamentally hardening the platform for the most demanding enterprise workloads.
This release is a direct result of focused planning and feedback from our key customers and community. We set out with three primary goals: extend KubeLB’s power to new environments, prepare for the next generation of intelligent applications, and deliver stability.
Release Highlights of KubeLB 1.2
This release has several improvements, and three major features represent a leap forward for the project:
- The KubeLB CLI (Beta): For the first time, you can now manage high-performance L4 load balancing for applications running on bare-metal and virtual machines. Tunneling support has also been introduced to expose applications running on your local machine or inside a VM to the internet. The new CLI extends KubeLB’s reach beyond the Kubernetes ecosystem, making it a truly universal load-balancing solution.
- AI Gateway Integration: KubeLB is now AI-native. By integrating the open-source Kgateway and its powerful inference extension, we are providing intelligent, seamless traffic management for AI and machine learning workloads directly at the network edge.
- A New Foundation of Quality: We have completely re-engineered our end-to-end testing framework with Chainsaw. This investment ensures KubeLB is more robust and reliable than ever before.
KubeLB Community Edition (CE) Features
The Community Edition is the heart of KubeLB, and version 1.2 brings plenty of new features focused on automation, flexibility, and an improved user experience.
- KubeLB CLI (Beta): The biggest new feature for CE is the KubeLB Command-Line Interface. Use a simple interactive CLI to manage load balancing configurations for your non-kubernetes applications, all managed and traffic served through KubeLB.
- Enhanced Security: Every release of KubeLB CLI includes verified Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) and cryptographic signatures to ensure the integrity and provenance of your downloads.
- KubeLB Addons: KubeLB addons helm chart has been introduced to simplify installation and management of the addons that can be used with KubeLB such as Envoy Gateway, Ingress Nginx, etc.
- Load Balancer Hostname: This allows users to specify a hostname for the load balancer. KubeLB then takes care of provisioning Ingress/Gateway API resources, DNS, and certificates etc.
- TenantState API: To share current state of the tenant, including limits for load balancers, gateways, allowed domains, etc. with the tenants. Previously, this information was not accessible for the end-users or tenants of KubeLB and only available in the management cluster.
- Default Load Balancer Annotations: You can now configure default annotations to be applied to all your LoadBalancer services, either globally or per-tenant. This is perfect for consistently applying required settings like cloud-specific location tags without manual intervention.
- Automated Gateway API Setup: To streamline modern traffic management, the KubeLB CCM can now automatically install the necessary Gateway API CRDs directly into your tenant clusters.
- Simplified KKP Integration: For users of the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform, our Helm chart can now automatically manage the complex RBAC roles, service accounts, and tokens required for integration.
- Expanded E2E Testing: Our new testing framework now includes comprehensive tests for UDP services, ensuring robust performance for DNS, VoIP, gaming, and other UDP-based applications.
KubeLB Enterprise Edition (EE) Features
KubeLB Enterprise Edition 1.2 is focused on providing cutting-edge capabilities and the integration required for large-scale, business-critical environments.
- AI Gateway Integration: The headline feature for EE is the integration of the Kgateway, providing intelligent traffic routing for AI/ML inference workloads. This positions KubeLB as a critical component for any enterprise MLOps platform as running your AI, MCP, and Agent2Agent toolings alongside your data plane is a common use case. We are now leveraging Kgateway to solidify the integration with AI, MCP, and Agent2Agent toolings.
- Tunneling: Support for tunneling has been introduced, allowing users to share applications running on their workstations or VMs either publicly over the internet or within their intranet network without worrying about firewalls, NAT, DNS, and certificate issues; it’s all automated.
- Public APIs: To empower our enterprise users and their automation workflows, the Enterprise Edition APIs are now public. This simplifies evaluation, integration with CI/CD systems, and allows for deeper programmatic control.
Get Started with KubeLB 1.2 Today!
KubeLB 1.2 is a statement about the future of networking. It’s a platform that bridges the gap between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure, embraces the intelligence of AI, and is built on an enterprise-grade foundation of reliability.
- Check out the release on GitHub and give us a star! ;)
- Read our new BGP Documentation
We encourage all users to upgrade to v1.2 and explore the new capabilities that KubeLB has to offer. A huge thank you to our entire community, our customers, and the dedicated contributors who helped shape this incredible release. We can’t wait to see what you build with KubeLB 1.2!
