Some cloud providers allow you to specify the loadBalancerIP. In those cases, the load-balancer is created with the user-specified loadBalancerIP. If the loadBalancerIP field is not specified, the loadBalancer is set up with an ephemeral IP address. If you specify a loadBalancerIP but your cloud provider does not support the feature, the loadbalancerIP field that you set is ignored.
It would be useful in my org's case to provision a static external IP address before making cluster changes. Happy to contribute a PR if that's alright with you.
As the Kubernetes docs note:
It would be useful in my org's case to provision a static external IP address before making cluster changes. Happy to contribute a PR if that's alright with you.