Load Balancer and Ingress Controller Setup within SUSE® Rancher Prime

After you launch an application, the app is only available within the cluster. It can’t be reached from outside the cluster.

If you want your applications to be externally accessible, you must add a load balancer or ingress to your cluster. Load balancers create a gateway for external connections to access your cluster, provided that the user knows the load balancer’s IP address and the application’s port number.

Rancher supports two types of load balancers:

For more information, see load balancers.

As mentioned in the limitations above, the disadvantages of using a load balancer are:

In contrast, when an ingress is used as the entrypoint into a cluster, the ingress can route traffic to multiple services with greater flexibility. It can map multiple HTTP requests to services without individual IP addresses for each service.

Therefore, it is useful to have an ingress if you want multiple services to be exposed with the same IP address, the same Layer 7 protocol, or the same privileged node-ports: 80 and 443.

Ingress works in conjunction with one or more ingress controllers to dynamically route service requests. When the ingress receives a request, the ingress controller(s) in your cluster direct the request to the correct service based on service subdomains or path rules that you’ve configured.

Each Kubernetes Ingress resource corresponds roughly to a file in /etc/nginx/sites-available/ containing a server{} configuration block, where requests for specific files and folders are configured.

Your ingress, which creates a port of entry to your cluster similar to a load balancer, can reside within your cluster or externally. Ingress and ingress controllers residing in RKE-launched clusters are powered by Nginx.

Ingress can provide other functionality as well, such as SSL termination, name-based virtual hosting, and more.