NGINX Ingress Controller

What is NGINX Ingress Controller?

The NGINX Ingress Controller is a specialized load balancer for Kubernetes environments 1. It is an Ingress controller that abstracts away the complexity of Kubernetes application traffic routing and provides a bridge between Kubernetes services and external ones.

Fortify Your Foundation: Enterprise-Class Assurance for Unrivaled App Availability, Security, and Visibility

Deployed at the central point of entry into a Kubernetes cluster, NGINX Ingress Controller reduces complexity, increases uptime, and provides better insights into app health and performance at scale.

Why Implement NGINX Ingress Controller?

Reduce Complexity:

NGINX Ingress Controller reduces tool sprawl through technology consolidation:

• A universal Kubernetes-native tool for implementing API gateways, load balancers, and Ingress controllers at the edge of a Kubernetes cluster
• The same data and control planes across any hybrid, multi-cloud environment
• Tight and seamless integration with NGINX Service Mesh for unified app connectivity to, from, and within the cluster

Deliver Apps Without Disruption:

NGINX Ingress Controller ensures availability of business-critical apps at all times with:

• Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS, HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSocket) and Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) load balancing with advanced distribution methods and active health checks.

•  Blue-green and canary deployments to avoid downtime when rolling out a new version of an app.

•  Dynamic reconfiguration, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request buffering to prevent connection timeouts and errors during topology changes, extremely high request rates, and service failures

Mitigate Cybersecurity Threats:

Integrate strong security controls at the edge of a Kubernetes cluster with NGINX Ingress Controller.

• Manage user and service identities and their authorized access and actions with HTTP Basic authentication, JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), OpenID Connect (OIDC), and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Secure incoming and outgoing communications through end-to-end encryption (SSL/TLS passthrough, TLS termination).
• Protect apps from the OWASP Top 10 and Layer 7 DoS attacks through integration with optional NGINX App Protect modules.

 Improve Visibility:

Achieve better visibility into app health and performance with more than 200 granular metrics monitored and reported by NGINX Ingress Controller:

• Reduce outages and downtime by discovering problems before they impact your customers.
• Simplify troubleshooting by finding the root cause of app issues quickly.
• Collect, monitor, and analyze your data through prebuilt integrations with your favorite ecosystem tools, including OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger.

 Release Apps Faster:

Deliver apps faster and easier with NGINX Ingress Controller:

• Focus on implementing core business expertise and functionality within the app.
• Offload security and other non-functional requirements to the platform layer.
• Enable self-service governance across multiple platform and development teams.

For more information View the Technical Specification