← Lab
kubelb
mixedKubernetes · minikubeCluster & infrastructureJuly 8, 2026
the question
Does a Kubernetes Service load-balance fairly under HTTP keep-alive?
what came out
No -- iptables balances new connections fairly (Gini 0.11) but conntrack pins each persistent connection to one pod, so replica coverage follows N(1-(1-1/N)^K) and stays below N even at 2x replicas. Keep-alive starves replicas. Real minikube, pre-registered, independently verified.
method & receipts
- Result: mixed
- Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
- Tested — a correctness/benchmark suite ships alongside the code.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/kubelb