Keepalived VirtualIP (VIP) is not necessarily a load balancing solution of its own. It can be a complement to the NGINX ingress controller or the HAProxy-based service LoadBalancer. The main motivation is that pods move around in Kubernetes, including your load balancer(s). That creates a problem for clients outside the network that require a stable endpoint. DNS is often not good enough due to performance issues. Keepalived provides a high-performance virtual IP address that can serve as the address to the NGINX ingress controller or the HAProxy load balancer. Keepalived utilizes core Linux networking facilities such as IPVS (IP virtual server) and implements high availability through Virtual Redundancy Router Protocol (VRRP). Everything runs at layer 4 (TCP/UDP). It takes some effort and attention to detail to configure it. Luckily, there is a Kubernetes contrib project that can get you started, at https://github.com/kubernetes/contrib/tree/master/keepalived-vip.