FAQ: NGINX Ingress Controller for routing

[drnickiw]

what

• NGINX Ingress Controller FAQ

why

• Imported from Google Doc

Links to #353

[osterman]

Suggested change

	Is the NGINX Ingress Controller needed for internal routing? I’d like more info on how that is meant to be used.
	Is the NGINX Ingress Controller needed for internal routing?

[osterman]

Suggested change

That said, the NGINX Ingress Controller is not uncommon in GKE as well. It operates in tandem with the platform-provided load balancer to route traffic within the cluster. The benefits of using the NGINX Ingress Controller is that you get all the features of NGINX (e.g. lua). The downside is that for very large clusters running thousands of pods, the Community Edition (CE) ingress reloads might be disruptive (which is why there's an enterprise offering by NGINX that supports real-time updates). A cluster can run multiple NGINX Ingress Controller deployments—even one per namespace. This can get expensive though, since each NGINX Ingress Controller ships with its own load balancer. An ingress resource then uses an annotation to select an ingress controller.

That said, the NGINX Ingress Controller is not uncommon in GKE as well. It operates in tandem with the platform-provided load balancer to route traffic within the cluster. The benefits of using the NGINX Ingress Controller is that you get all the features of NGINX (e.g. lua). The downside is that for very large clusters running thousands of pods, the Community Edition (CE) ingress reloads might be disruptive (which is why there's an enterprise offering by NGINX that supports real-time updates). A cluster can run multiple Ingress Controller deployments—even one per namespace. This can get expensive though, since each NGINX Ingress Controller ships with its own load balancer. An ingress resource then uses an annotation to select an ingress controller.