Ingress Controllers

In order for the Ingress resource to work, the cluster must have an ingress controller running.

Unlike other types of controllers which run as part of the kube-controller-manager binary, Ingress controllers are not started automatically with a cluster. Use this page to choose the ingress controller implementation that best fits your cluster.

Kubernetes as a project supports and maintains AWS, GCE, and nginx ingress controllers.

Additional controllers

Caution: This section links to third party projects that provide functionality required by Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project authors aren't responsible for these projects. This page follows CNCF website guidelines by listing projects alphabetically. To add a project to this list, read the content guide before submitting a change.

• AKS Application Gateway Ingress Controller is an ingress controller that configures the Azure Application Gateway.
• Ambassador API Gateway is an Envoy-based ingress controller.
• Apache APISIX ingress controller is an Apache APISIX-based ingress controller.
• Avi Kubernetes Operator provides L4-L7 load-balancing using VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
• The Citrix ingress controller works with Citrix Application Delivery Controller.
• Contour is an Envoy based ingress controller.
• EnRoute is an Envoy based API gateway that can run as an ingress controller.
• F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services for Kubernetes lets you use an Ingress to configure F5 BIG-IP virtual servers.
• Gloo is an open-source ingress controller based on Envoy, which offers API gateway functionality.
• HAProxy Ingress is an ingress controller for HAProxy.
• The HAProxy Ingress Controller for Kubernetes is also an ingress controller for HAProxy.
• Istio Ingress is an Istio based ingress controller.
• The Kong Ingress Controller for Kubernetes is an ingress controller driving Kong Gateway.
• The NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes works with the NGINX webserver (as a proxy).
• Skipper HTTP router and reverse proxy for service composition, including use cases like Kubernetes Ingress, designed as a library to build your custom proxy.
• The Traefik Kubernetes Ingress provider is an ingress controller for the Traefik proxy.
• Tyk Operator extends Ingress with Custom Resources to bring API Management capabilities to Ingress. Tyk Operator works with the Open Source Tyk Gateway & Tyk Cloud control plane.
• Voyager is an ingress controller for HAProxy.

Using multiple Ingress controllers

You may deploy any number of ingress controllers within a cluster. When you create an ingress, you should annotate each ingress with the appropriate ingress.class to indicate which ingress controller should be used if more than one exists within your cluster.

If you do not define a class, your cloud provider may use a default ingress controller.

Ideally, all ingress controllers should fulfill this specification, but the various ingress controllers operate slightly differently.

Note: Make sure you review your ingress controller's documentation to understand the caveats of choosing it.

What's next

• Learn more about Ingress.
• Set up Ingress on Minikube with the NGINX Controller.