Kubernetes Ingress and Load Balancing

Introduction:

As Kubernetes becomes the backbone of modern application infrastructure, managing external access to your containerized applications becomes crucial. This is where Ingress and Load Balancing come into play. These components work together to route traffic efficiently, ensure high availability, and enable secure access to services running inside your Kubernetes cluster.

What is Kubernetes Ingress?

Ingress is a Kubernetes API object that provides HTTP and HTTPS routing to services within your cluster. It acts as a reverse proxy, managing external access to your services without exposing each service directly through a LoadBalancer or NodePort.

Why Use Ingress?

• Centralized traffic routing

• SSL/TLS termination

• Path and host-based routing

• Reduces

Basic Ingress Architecture

Client Request

|

[Ingress Controller]

|

[Ingress Rules]

|

[Kubernetes Services]

|

[Pods]

Ingress Controller: The Brains Behind Ingress:

Ingress is just a configuration object. It requires an Ingress Controller to enforce its rules.

•  Popular Ingress Controllers:

  • NGINX Ingress Controller

  • HAProxy Ingress

  • Traefik

  • Kong

  • Istio Gateway (with service mesh)

Kubernetes Load Balancing Explained:

Load Balancing in Kubernetes distributes traffic across multiple pods or nodes to ensure:

• High availability

• Better performance

• Fault tolerance

  
  

Three Main Types:

• Internal (Pod-Level) Load Balancing

  • Handled automatically by Kube-proxy

  • Uses ClusterIP to route internal traffic to healthy pods.

• External (Node-Level) Load Balancing

  • Achieved using NodePort or LoadBalancer

  • LoadBalancer creates a cloud-managed external load balancer.

• Ingress Load Balancing

  • Provides smart routing with additional capabilities like SSL termination, host/path-based rules.

    
    

TLS Termination with Ingress:

You can secure your applications using SSL certificates directly on Ingress:

spec:

tls:

- hosts:

- example.com

secretName: example-tls

Ingress with Path and Host-Based Routing:

• Host-based:

rules:

- host: api.example.com

• Path-based:

rules:

- http:

paths:

- path: /app1

- path:

Best Practices for Ingress and Load Balancing:

• Use DNS-based routing for multi-environment deployments.

• Enable health checks on backend services.

• Secure traffic with TLS and HTTP to HTTPS redirects.

• Set up rate limiting and authentication using annotations or middleware.

• Monitor Ingress logs and metrics with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack.

• Use an L7-aware ingress controller (e.g., NGINX or Traefik) for advanced routing rules.

Conclusion:

Kubernetes Ingress and Load Balancing are critical components for exposing and managing traffic to your cloud-native applications. While LoadBalancers provide basic routing at the infrastructure level, Ingress delivers intelligent HTTP-layer routing that is customizable, secure, and scalable.