What's the difference between exposing nginx as load balancer vs Ingress controller?

Question

I understood Ingress can be used when we want to expose multiple service/routes with a single Load Balancer / public IP.

Now I want to expose my Nginx server to publ

Answer 1

Accepted answer covered a lots of stuff already. All of the reasons are valid, apart from that the reason I am using ingress controller in aws is to minimize cost. I have multiple web applications which are running in kubernetes cluster aws. To access those applications instead of exposing individual application as LoadBalancer and creating individual ELB (each ELB cost money), I expose ingress controller service as LoadBalancer and created ingress rule for each.

Steps involve:

• Ingress service, exposed as loadbalancer which created ELB in aws lets say elb1.aws.com
• Ingress rule for each web applications, eg example.com, awesome.com, helloworld.com
• Route53 mapping all mapped to same ELB, eg: example.com -> elb1.aws.com awesome.com -> elb1.aws.com helloworld.com -> elb1.aws.com