The Isovalent Load Balancer

Enterprise requirements are a constant. We see a huge number of applications being developed, deployed, or used, especially in the context of businesses, cloud computing, microservices, mobile and web access, DevOps, and the growth of AI and IoT. This leads to increased complexity in the network, more traffic, and a greater number of deployment targets (edge, cloud, and hybrid). Enterprises have to pay a significant premium for infrastructure that helps them meet these needs, spanning security, availability, observability, and performance/scalability requirements. To keep up with this ever-increasing rate of applications, enterprises need solutions that allow them to manage application traffic in a scalable and efficient way. We are delighted to announce the availability of the Isovalent Load Balancer, which is designed to distribute application traffic across heterogeneous environments (data center/ on-prem, cloud-native, or self-hosted/managed Kubernetes).

What is the Isovalent Load Balancer?

What is Isovalent Load Balancer? - YouTube

The Isovalent Load Balancer manages how incoming requests (like from users visiting a website or app) are shared across multiple backend servers. It has multiple features, not limited to:

• The ILB will be a single logical point for client traffic ingress with authentication, access control, and observability functionality built in.
• It will distribute the ingress traffic across multiple backends, enabling health-checking, self-healing, and other configurable traffic load-balancing patterns.
• It load balances based on IP address, TCP/UDP ports, HTTP headers, cookies, or URLs.
• It ensures high availability with the applications not being affected if the backend server(s) go down by distributing the traffic to other server(s) as per the defined load balancing algorithm.
• High-performance and low-latency: utilizing eBPF/XDP, Maglev, and Direct Server Return (DSR) with true cloud-native horizontal scaling.
• Rich observability: Advanced logs and analytics with built-in dashboards and exporters to any popular log collector.
• ILB offers a variety of configuration APIs, starting from Isovalent CRDs, offering the full range of ILB features but also including Gateway API/Ingress CRDs for Kubernetes platform teams.

Fireside chat: Isovalent Enterprise Load Balancer

Join a special conversation with Thomas Graf, co-founder and CTO at Isovalent & VP of Security at Cisco, and Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, as they introduce the upcoming Isovalent Enterprise Load Balancer.

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What problems does the Isovalent Load Balancer solve?

Built with eBPF for Kubernetes & Cloud-Native

• Future-Proof Your Infrastructure with Leading eBPF Technology: Enterprises use hardware-centric ADCs (Application Delivery Controllers) for application load balancing. These solutions are often tied to specific infrastructures or vendors and seen as difficult to migrate away from. Isovalent offers a universal, eBPF/Envoy-powered load balancer that spans Kubernetes, virtualization, public cloud, and even DPU-enabled Cisco switches. Built on powerful eBPF and Cilium technology for maximum performance with millions of packets per second. Designed for demanding container & cloud-native environments and large-scale Kubernetes environments.
• Accelerate Application Delivery: Stop disrupting application development and start accelerating deployment workflows with API-driven automation, CI/CD integration, and native integrations into Kubernetes, OpenShift, and managed container platforms.
• Maximize Observability: Enterprises send massive amounts of unfiltered telemetry data to Splunk, incurring high costs and often ingesting low-signal noise. Isovalent solves this by enabling decentralized eBPF-based filtering and aggregation at the data source-VMs, servers, and Kubernetes nodes, so only high-value signal data is pushed to Splunk. This dramatically reduces ingest volume and cost. It also aligns with new Splunk capabilities, allowing data to be held in cheaper data lakes (like S3) and pulled in only when needed.
• Reduce Complexity & Cost: Reuse your existing infrastructure by turning existing VM management platforms into powerful load balancers. Save costs by automating deployment, horizontal scaling, and centralizing device management.

Run anywhere, natively

• Run Anywhere - Data center, Multi Cloud, and Edge: Power load balancing in large data centers, seamlessly across any cloud, and efficiently at distributed edges. Variable footprint based on your needs.
• Native Platform Integrations:
  • Runs on and integrates with any platform to provide a seamless operational experience:
    • Kubernetes: Kubernetes Ingress & Gateway API Controller
    • VMware: vSphere
    • Red Hat OpenShift: Certified OpenShift Operator
    • Public Cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.
    • Data Center: BGP
• Cost-Efficient Scaling: Save costs by avoiding overprovisioning. Scale your application delivery infrastructure dynamically and provision what you need, when you need it.

High-performance, elastic, and efficient

• High-Performance and Low Latency eBPF Dataplane: Achieve exceptional performance and latency while handling millions of packets per second with the high-performance dataplane built on powerful eBPF technology featuring consistent hashing with Maglev and direct-server-return (DSR).
• Modern Feature-Rich Dataplane: Meet the demands of legacy applications and modern microservices with one load balancer layer:
  • L3-L7 Load Balancing (HTTP, TCP, UDP, SOCKS, Websockets, SSL).
  • Native Kubernetes Integration.
  • CI/CD and Canary deployments.
  • Fully automated &Self-healing.
  • Extensive observability, Tracing, and Logging.
  • Authentication, IP blocking.
• Maximum Elasticity and Efficiency: Automatically scale your load balancer horizontally for maximum efficiency and to adapt to changing performance requirements.

Accelerate application development

• Frictionless Developer Experience: Developers enjoy a frictionless experience by consuming the Kubernetes or REST API for enhanced productivity. The application delivery configuration automatically blends into the application deployment process or CI/CD pipeline for reduced complexity.
• Share infrastructure with Multi-Tenancy Support: Developers can work independently to configure and troubleshoot application delivery while sharing infrastructure. RBAC support in the API ensures for separation of concerns.
• Improve Application Stability & Rollout Success: Help application teams be successful, minimize disruptions, and eliminate disruptive on-call interruptions with the help of canary releases, A/B testing, and circuit-breaking.
• Faster Time to Improved Security: Accelerate the time to improved application infrastructure security with SSL, offload, authorization, and IP blocking.

What features does the Isovalent Load Balancer offer?

The Isovalent Load Balancer will offer these features today out of the box, and more features are in the pipeline as we sit down to solve complex problems for customers.

A preemptive approach to load balancing

We encourage you to try out the Isovalent Load Balancer and see how you can:

• Reduce Complexity & Cost: Turn existing VM management platforms into powerful load balancers. Save costs by automating deployment, horizontal scaling, and centralizing device management.
• Maximize Security & Observability: Elevate your security with zero-trust principles. Free application teams from handling SSL certificates. Gain valuable observability across your application delivery layer
• Future-Proof your Infrastructure for Multi-Cloud & Kubernetes: Built on powerful open source technology, built for demanding containers, and hardened in hyperscale Kubernetes environments. Prepare for infrastructure for Multi-Cloud, Kubernetes, and AI.
• Accelerate Application Delivery: Stop disrupting application development, start accelerating deployment workflows with API-driven CI/CD integration and native integrations into Kubernetes, OpenShift, and managed container platforms

Request a demo today to learn more before getting started.

Getting started with Isovalent Load Balancer

Step into the world of modern, high-performance load balancing with the Isovalent Load Balancer.

• Try the lab

Learn more

• Join the Isovalent Enterprise Load Balancer: Fireside Chat
• Try out the Getting Started with the Isovalent Load Balancer hands-on lab
• More on the Isovalent Load Balancer product
• Watch the What is Isovalent Load Balancer? video

Thomas Graf, CTO & Co-Founder Isovalent, Co-Creator Cilium, CTO & VP Engineering Cisco Security

Thomas Graf is the CTO of Cisco Security and Vice President Engineering for Multi-Cloud Products and a recognized leader in the fields of networking, security, and open-source technology. As the Co-Founder and CTO of Isovalent, he played a pivotal role in advancing eBPF-based networking and security solutions before the company's acquisition by Cisco.

With a deep background in Linux kernel development, Thomas previously served as a technical lead for Red Hat’s kernel team, where he contributed to foundational innovations in networking and security. As a pioneer in networking and security, Thomas has driven key advancements such as eBPF that have influenced the broader industry.

As one of the creators of Cilium, a widely adopted open source project for Kubernetes networking and security, Thomas has been at the forefront of the cloud-native movement, enabling enterprises to build secure, high-performance infrastructure at scale.