Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Study Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22. Ingresses

Chapter 21 delved into the purpose and creation of the Service primitive. Once there’s a need to expose the application to external consumers, selecting an appropriate Service type becomes crucial. The most practical choice often involves creating a Service of type LoadBalancer. Such a Service offers load balancing capabilities by assigning an external IP address accessible to consumers outside the Kubernetes cluster.

However, opting for a LoadBalancer Service for each externally reachable application has drawbacks. In a cloud provider environment, each Service triggers the provisioning of an external load balancer, resulting in increased costs. Additionally, managing a collection of LoadBalancer Service objects can lead to administrative challenges, as a new object must be established for each externally accessible microservice.

To mitigate these issues, the Ingress primitive comes into play, offering a singular, load-balanced entry point to an application stack. An Ingress possesses the ability to route external HTTP(S) requests to one or more Services within the cluster based on an optional, DNS-resolvable host name and URL context path. This chapter will guide you through the creation and access of an Ingress.

Coverage of Curriculum Objectives

This chapter addresses the following curriculum objective:

• Use Ingress rules to expose applications

Accessing an Ingress in minikube

Accessing an Ingress in minikube requires special handling. Refer to the ...