Ingress in Kubernetes is a way to manage external access to applications running inside your cluster. Ingress provides a means of an external facing load balancer, or a gateway, that routes traffic from outside of the cluster to services within the cluster. It allows for very finely grained and secured control over how traffic is routed to applications in the cluster, giving cluster administrators more control over how external users connect to their applications. Additionally, ingress simplifies the process of exposing your applications to the internet by providing a single entry point and routing rules for accessing resources.
BENEFITS –
- Automated SSL Certificate Management: Ingress leverages the open-source project Cert Manager to automate the process of obtaining and renewing SSL certificates. This means that you don’t have to manually manage the certificates or worry about their expiration.
- Easier Load Balancing: Ingress simplifies load balancing by providing a single endpoint for multiple services. It is able to route requests to the right service based on the URL or other parameters. This eliminates the need for manual configuration and eliminates the possibility of manual errors.
- High Availability and Scalability: Ingress is highly available and scales easily with the number of services it routes. It can scale up with more resources or down with fewer services. This helps ensure that your services are always available and can scale when required.
- Network Security: Ingress provides the capability to restrict access to specific services and limit the source IP addresses. It can also filter out malicious requests and secure communication between services.
- Extensibility and Flexibility: Ingress provides a great amount of extensibility and flexibility. It supports multiple backends like Kubernetes services, containers, and VMs. It also has built-in support for custom authentication mechanisms so you can build custom authentication systems for your applications.
Overall, Ingress is a powerful and useful tool in the Kubernetes ecosystem. With its automated SSL certificate management, easier load balancing, high availability, scalability, security, and extensibility, it allows organizations to manage and control their services in the most efficient way possible. It can be the perfect tool to improve the performance and security of your services.