Load balancers are created by the pre-installed controller that each cloud provides to let external traffic reach the nodes. You don't have to use it. It's no

Load balancers are created by the pre-installed controller that each cloud provides to let external traffic reach the nodes. You don't have to use it. It's no different than running your own load balancer like HAProxy pointed at the nodes which forward to a node-port service. There's also MetalLB if you're running your own hardware: https://metallb.universe.tf/ https://metallb.universe.tf/