Besides Ingress, what components or mechanisms control or handle network traffic in Kubernetes?

In Kubernetes, in addition to Ingress, network traffic is managed and processed by the following components and mechanisms:

• Service — an abstraction that defines how to access one or more Pods. A Service can be of type ClusterIP (internal cluster access), NodePort (external access via a node port), or LoadBalancer (uses an external load balancer).

• Network Policies — rules that control which traffic is allowed between Pods and from outside.

• CNI plugins (Container Network Interface) — implement the cluster's networking subsystem, providing routing and traffic isolation between Pods.

• DaemonSet with proxies or load balancers — for example, kube-proxy, which manages iptables or IPVS rules for routing traffic to the appropriate Pods.

• External Load Balancers — outside Kubernetes but integrated with it for traffic distribution at the infrastructure level.

Thus, Ingress handles HTTP/HTTPS traffic routing at the application level, while the other components provide lower-level management and routing of network traffic inside and outside the cluster.