I start off with my question: how can I setup redundancy with several DBs without having to install anything special on each of the clients?

I have seen that the usual way to do it is to install something like pgpool on each client which can handle whether to write to the master or to pick a slave for the read. I would like to find a way to move the responsibility to the server, either by having a very small machine with just that dedicated function (effectively acting as Load Balancer) or something that can be setup on the DBs.

So the clients will only try to connect to http://IP_BALANCER and that machine will be able to revert all the operations accordingly, exactly as pgpool would do. Is that possible? If so, is that a good way to do it?

I am asking this question because the 'clients' would be a set of very light pods on a Kubernetes cluster. I managed to make the pods very minimal (they run with only compiled machine code) and I wouldn't want to have to add pgpool on top of them, since I would have to start adding an actual OS to be able to achieve that.