DevOps Dictionary

Kubernetes Ingress is a Kubernetes API resource that describes how inbound HTTP and HTTPS requests should be routed from outside the cluster to the correct internal Service, typically using hostname and URL path rules and optional TLS (HTTPS) settings. It solves the problem of exposing multiple applications through a consistent entry point without giving every Service its own public load balancer. At a high level, you declare routing rules in an Ingress object, and an Ingress controller (a component that watches these objects and configures a reverse proxy or cloud load balancer) turns that desired state into working network configuration.

With Kubernetes Ingress, teams get centralized routing, TLS termination, and more uniform traffic management; without it, exposure often falls back to NodePort or per-Service load balancers, which can increase cost and make security and routing behavior harder to standardize. This gap exists because the Ingress resource is only a specification, and the controller is what implements it.