By rmalenko
Hello,
How I can affinity DOLB to nodes only which have a tag? I have already configured three droplets with Istio in DO Kubernetes cluster. So I would like to direct traffic from LB only to these three nodes.
Regards, Rostyslav
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Heya, @rmalenko
DigitalOcean’s cloud Load Balancer (and the type: LoadBalancer you get in DOKS) can’t target “only nodes with a given Droplet tag”. It doesn’t understand Droplet tags at the Kubernetes level, and by default, it sends traffic to the Service’s NodePort on every node in the cluster.
The usual workaround is to make sure only the nodes you want are eligible to receive traffic:
If this is for an Ingress gateway (Istio), run the gateway as a DaemonSet (or otherwise ensure it only runs on those 3 nodes using a nodeSelector / node affinity), and set the Service in front of it to externalTrafficPolicy: Local. With Local, nodes that don’t have a ready gateway pod won’t be used as backends, so the LB effectively only hits the nodes you pinned the gateway to.
If you don’t want it on every node, another clean pattern is a dedicated node pool for “ingress” (label those nodes), then pin the gateway pods to that pool (and optionally taint the pool so only gateway pods land there).
So, you can’t filter LB backends by Droplet tag directly, but you can achieve the same result by controlling where the receiving pods run + using externalTrafficPolicy: Local.
Regards
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