Ingress and Load Balancing¶
AKS traffic entry points combine Kubernetes Services, Azure load balancers, and one or more ingress controllers. Separate north-south routing from east-west service discovery in your design.
Main Content¶
flowchart TD
U[Users] --> PIP[Public IP or Private IP]
PIP --> LB[Azure Load Balancer]
LB --> IC[Ingress Controller]
IC --> SVC[Service]
SVC --> PODS[Pods]Core traffic primitives¶
- Service type LoadBalancer exposes a workload through an Azure load balancer.
- Ingress provides HTTP routing, TLS termination strategy, and path/host mapping.
- Internal load balancer patterns are common for private platform APIs.
Common AKS ingress choices¶
- NGINX Ingress Controller for broad Kubernetes ecosystem compatibility.
- Application Gateway for Containers or app routing add-on when Azure-managed edge integration is preferred.
- Service meshes or gateway APIs for larger platform-standard traffic controls.
[!WARNING] ingress-nginx upstream maintenance ends in March 2026. In AKS, the application routing add-on can continue using NGINX through November 2026, but Gateway API is the recommended long-term direction for new designs.
Useful commands¶
kubectl get ingress -A
kubectl get svc -A
kubectl describe ingress <ingress-name> -n <namespace>
az network public-ip list --resource-group MC_<managed-resource-group>_<cluster-name>_<location> --output table