What are Ingress and Ingress Controller in Kubernetes?

Ingress in Kubernetes is an object that manages external access to services within a cluster, usually via HTTP/HTTPS. It defines routing rules based on URLs, hosts, and other parameters.

Ingress Controller is a component that implements these rules in practice. It listens for changes in Ingress objects and configures a load balancer or proxy server (such as NGINX, Traefik) to route traffic according to the specified rules.

Example: you create an Ingress with a rule that requests to example.com/api go to the api-service, and requests to example.com/web go to the web-service. The Ingress Controller applies these rules and ensures correct routing.