What is the main purpose and function of the Ingress component in Kubernetes?

The Ingress component in Kubernetes is responsible for managing external access to services within the cluster. Its main task is to accept HTTP/HTTPS requests from outside and route them to the appropriate services inside the cluster based on routing rules.

Ingress allows:

• Defining routing rules based on URL paths or hostnames.
• Providing load balancing among pods.
• Configuring SSL/TLS termination for secure connections.
• Centralized management of access to applications.

Example: if you have multiple services (e.g., frontend and backend), Ingress can route requests to example.com/frontend to one service, and to example.com/api to another.

To operate Ingress, an Ingress Controller is required — a component that implements these rules and handles traffic.