Why do you need Ingress in Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a powerful tool for managing containerized applications, but as your application grows, managing the traffic to your services can become increasingly complex. This is where Ingress in Kubernetes comes in. Ingress allows you to define routing rules for incoming traffic, making it a powerful tool for managing the traffic to your services in a Kubernetes cluster.

One of the main benefits of using Ingress in Kubernetes is that it allows for a more flexible and fine-grained control over incoming traffic. With Ingress, you can route traffic to different services based on the URL path or hostname. This allows you to easily handle multiple domains or subdomains within a single cluster, and to route traffic to different services based on the URL path as depicted in the following diagram.

Another benefit of using Ingress in Kubernetes is that it can provide a number of different features such as load balancing, SSL termination, and rate limiting. This allows you to easily manage the traffic to your services, and to ensure that your services can handle the load.

Ingress also allows you to easily update the routing rules for your services without having to update the services themselves. This makes it easy to change the routing rules for your services as your application evolves, without having to make changes to the services themselves. It is much like a bot sitting inside your kubernetes cluster, watching for the ingress rules, and updating the configurations (e.g. nginx configurations) when it discovers an update in the ingress object.

Ingress also enables you to secure your service by adding authentication and authorization to your service. This will make sure that only authorized users can access the service.

In summary, Ingress in Kubernetes allows for a more flexible and fine-grained control over incoming traffic, it can provide a number of different features such as load balancing, SSL termination, and rate limiting, it allows you to easily update the routing rules for your services and it enables you to secure your service by adding authentication and authorization. It is an essential tool for managing the traffic to your services in a Kubernetes cluster and should be considered in any Kubernetes-based application.