Understanding Ingress and Ingress Controllers in Kubernetes

        As Kubernetes adoption continues to rise in the world of containerized applications, one critical component that often comes up is Ingress. Ingress provides a powerful way to manage external access to services running inside a Kubernetes cluster, especially for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. In this article, we’ll dive deep into Ingress and Ingress Controllers, exploring how they function and how they contribute to the smooth operation of Kubernetes-based systems.

What is Ingress?

In the context of Kubernetes, Ingress is an API object that manages external access to services within a Kubernetes cluster. Unlike a Kubernetes Service, which provides a basic way to expose individual services inside the cluster, Ingress allows more advanced routing and management of external HTTP(S) traffic.

1. Ingress serves two main purposes:Routing Traffic: It can define rules for routing external HTTP/S traffic to the appropriate services in the cluster based on URL paths, hostnames, and other HTTP properties.
2. TLS Termination: Ingress can also handle TLS (Transport Layer Security) termination, enabling secure HTTPS connections to your services.

A typical use case of an Ingress would be directing traffic from a URL like https://myapp.example.com to a specific service running inside the Kubernetes cluster, say myapp-service, without exposing the individual services directly to the outside world.

Key Features of Ingress:

1. Path-based routing: Ingress can route traffic based on URL paths (e.g., /app1 -> app1-service, /app2 -> app2-service).