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Kubernetes networking routes traffic to application pods through three components: Services, Ingress, and Ingress Controllers.

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Services

A Service exposes an application running on a set of pods through a single, stable IP address. Because pods are frequently restarted or recreated, their IP addresses can change — the Service IP remains constant and distributes incoming traffic across all available pods.

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Ingress

Ingress defines how external requests should reach services inside the cluster. A path like /login maps to the authentication service — when traffic arrives at example.com/login, Ingress routes it to that service. External traffic reaches an application through three Kubernetes components:
  1. Ingress that routes traffic from external networks to services.
  2. A Service that routes traffic to pods.
  3. Pods with containers running the application.

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Ingress Controllers

An Ingress Controller implements the routing rules defined by Ingress objects. It reads those objects, configures routing based on those rules, and directs incoming traffic to the matching service.