Why is IP Forwarding disabled for GKE nodes ? can't find a way to enable IP forwarding at all.

[AbhijithKS]

Is there a way to enable IP Forwarding for GKE nodes ?

[garisingh]

What exactly are you trying to do?   How are you planning to use IP-forwarding?

[AbhijithKS]

I am trying to deploy an external load balancer (Avi+AKO) which needs IP forwarding to be turned on since it adds a static route for the pods and next hop will be set as the node IP's. So GKE nodes will forward the traffic.
Is there a way to enable IP forwarding ? I tried with gcloud export and tried to edit the file to enable IP Forwarding. But IP Forwarding option isn't available even there.

[AbhijithKS]

@garisingh- is ip forwarding possible? - I am trying to deploy an external load balancer (Avi+AKO) which needs IP forwarding to be turned on since it adds a static route for the pods and next hop will be set as the node IP's. So GKE nodes will forward the traffic.
Is there a way to enable IP forwarding ? I tried with gcloud export and tried to edit the file to enable IP Forwarding. But IP Forwarding option isn't available even there.

[garisingh]

We disable IP forwarding on VPC native clusters because typically it is not needed as pods are directly routable on the VPC.  Looking at AKO, it looks like you can simply set `AKOSettings.disableStaticRouteSync` to `true` and then there is no need to configure static routes with GKE (see https://avinetworks.com/docs/ako/1.10/ako-in-gke-aks-eks/)