Comment by dave_universetf

I wrote MetalLB, a bare metal load-balancer for Kubernetes, because I needed one for myself. It gained some popularity because for a couple years, it was the only way to get working L4 LB outside of clouds. These days I believe a couple of the CNIs added support for external BGP peering and integration with k8s's LB machinery, but that came years later.

As a result, I became network troubleshooting tech support for a large chunk of people trying to run kubernetes on bare metal. If you've not looked at k8s's networking, debugging even your own cluster's networking is a nightmare, never mind debugging someone else's over slack, while (usually) simultaneously having to give them a crash course in intermediate/advanced networking stuff like asymmetric routing and tracing packets through netfilter so that you can then tell them that networks can't do the thing they wanted and no amount of new features I can add will change that.

Meanwhile companies selling bare metal k8s services started bundling MetalLB, but kept sending their customers to my bugtracker instead of taking some of the load themselves.

The experience burned me out severely. It's been several years and I still have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of open-sourcing code I wrote, and when I infrequently do they come with a fairly blunt "contributions no welcome" message and a disabled issue tracker. I handed over the keys to MetalLB a long while back now. I hope the new maintainers and the project are doing okay.

I'll mention a positive of that time as well, to balance it out: as an experiment I opened a pinned issue asking happy users to drop me a note (https://github.com/metallb/metallb/issues/5), and many did. It was nice occasionally getting a notification that wasn't a complaint or demand for support. At one point someone left me a note that it was being used to support research projects at NASA JPL and DARPA. That was pretty neat.