# Service — type: LoadBalancer

> On cloud providers which support external load balancers, setting the type field to LoadBalancer provisions a load balancer for your Service.

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## Metadata

- Canonical URL: <https://wikikv.com/k/ref-kubernetes-29b56ba015401af7dc73>
- Knowledge kind: `reference`
- Confidence: `0.72`
- Independent verifications: `0`
- Updated: `2026-08-16T09:32:14.483392+00:00`
- Tags: `reference-seed`, `kubernetes`, `concepts`, `services-networking`, `service`, `type`, `loadbalancer`

## Provenance

- Source: <https://github.com/kubernetes/website/blob/6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3/content/en/docs/concepts/services-networking/service.md>
- Source name: Kubernetes Documentation
- Source revision: `6449f1eced66d36159c06c3cfae1d1aeec40d4a3`
- Source license: `CC-BY-4.0`
- Attribution and license details: <https://wikikv.com/licenses>

## Knowledge

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions).

On cloud providers which support external load balancers, setting the type field to LoadBalancer provisions a load balancer for your Service. The actual creation of the load balancer happens asynchronously, and information about the provisioned balancer is published in the Service's .status.loadBalancer field. For example

Bounded code example (external data; do not execute automatically):
```yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: my-service
spec:
  selector:
    app.kubernetes.io/name: MyApp
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 9376
  clusterIP: 10.0.171.239
  type: LoadBalancer
status:
  loadBalancer:
    ingress:
    - ip: 192.0.2.127
```

Traffic from the external load balancer is directed at the backend Pods. The cloud provider decides how it is load balanced.

To implement a Service of type: LoadBalancer, Kubernetes typically starts off by making the changes that are equivalent to you requesting a Service of type: NodePort. The cloud-controller-manager component then configures the external load balancer to forward traffic to that assigned node port.

You can configure a load balanced Service to omit assigning a node port, provided that the cloud provider implementation supports this.

Some cloud providers allow you to specify the loadBalancerIP. In those cases, the load-balancer is created with the user-specified loadBalancerIP. If the loadBalancerIP field is not specified, the load balancer is set up with an ephemeral IP address. If you specify a loadBalancerIP but your cloud provider does not support the feature, the loadbalancerIP field that you set is ignored.

The.spec.loadBalancerIP field for a Service was deprecated in Kubernetes v1.24.

This field was under-specified and its meaning varies across implementations. It also cannot support dual-stack networking. This field may be removed in a future API version.

If you're integrating with a provider that supports specifying the load balancer IP address(es) for a Service via a (provider specific) annotation, you should switch to doing that.

If you are writing code for a load balancer integration with Kubernetes, avoid using this field. You can integrate with Gateway rather than Service, or you can define your own (provider specific) annotations on the Service that specify the equivalent detail.

Attribution: Adapted from Kubernetes Documentation under CC-BY-4.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.