Ingress Resources and Routing Rules

You've configured Services correctly: ClusterIP for internal discovery, LoadBalancer for external access. But LoadBalancer creates one IP per Service. In a cluster running fifty microservices, that's fifty load balancers, fifty DNS entries, and a line item on every monthly invoice. Ingress is how you consolidate that: one load balancer IP, routing decisions made at the HTTP layer based on hostname and path.

The Ingress resource maps external HTTP/HTTPS traffic to internal Services using rules you define in YAML. The controller (ingress-nginx, Traefik, Contour, or the cloud provider's own implementation) handles the actual proxying. The Ingress resource is the configuration declaration.