NGINX Ingress Controller

What NGINX Ingress Controller is

NGINX Ingress Controller is self-hosted software for routing Kubernetes traffic and balancing WebSocket, gRPC, TCP, and UDP applications. It supports content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination, while annotations and ConfigMaps let operators configure additional NGINX features. Manifest installation can use Deployment, DaemonSet, or StatefulSet modes. Its policy resources cover access control, rate limits, API keys, authentication, mTLS, WAF, CORS, and HSTS, though some policies require NGINX Plus. Plus also adds real-time metrics, further load-balancing methods, session persistence, active health checks, and JWT validation. The free plan uses NGINX Open Source and requires a Kubernetes cluster; the Plus plan requires a subscription and JWT or certificate credentials for registry access. Metrics can be exposed in Prometheus format, including through a ServiceMonitor with Prometheus Operator. Documented integrations include cert-manager, ExternalDNS, Prometheus, Istio, Linkerd, Open Service Mesh, and F5 products. F5 recommends encrypting Kubernetes Secrets at rest and least-privilege RBAC, since the default ServiceAccount can access all cluster Secrets. A read-only root filesystem is also recommended but is not enabled by default.