AKS Networking and Ingress#

AKS networking involves three layers: how pods communicate (CNI plugin), how traffic enters the cluster (load balancers and ingress controllers), and how the cluster connects to other Azure resources (VNet integration, private endpoints). Each layer has Azure-specific behavior that differs from generic Kubernetes.

Azure Load Balancer for Services#

When you create a Service of type LoadBalancer in AKS, Azure provisions a Standard SKU Azure Load Balancer. AKS manages the load balancer rules and health probes automatically.

Ingress Controllers and Routing Patterns#

An Ingress resource defines HTTP routing rules – which hostnames and paths map to which backend Services. But an Ingress resource does nothing on its own. You need an Ingress controller running in the cluster to watch for Ingress resources and configure the actual reverse proxy.

Ingress Controllers#

The two most common controllers are nginx-ingress and Traefik.

nginx-ingress (ingress-nginx):

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm install ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx --namespace ingress-nginx --create-namespace

Note: there are two different nginx ingress projects. kubernetes/ingress-nginx (community) and nginxinc/kubernetes-ingress (NGINX Inc). The community version is far more common. Make sure you install from https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx, not the NGINX Inc chart.