Azure Kubernetes Service: using an NGINX ingress controller with a Ocelot-based API gateway

Question

I am planning to deploy to an AKS cluster and use an NGINX ingress controller, so that my micro-services will be internal to the cluster and the NGINX ingress controller will be the entry point to the micro-services.

One of my micro-services acts as an API gateway using the Ocelot library, and it implements the BFF pattern. So my ingress controller will have only one rule which will route requests made to the path "/(.*)" to the API gateway micro-service.

My question is - is this the conventional way to use an ingress controller and an API gateway micro-service? Somehow it feels redundant, although I could think that both have different responsibilities.

Answer 1

I don't think you would need an Ingress-Controller in this case, we use an API Gateway which is Ambassador and we simply have a public IP assigned to its kubernetes service.

If you don't expect other pods to expose themselves using Ingress objects, and that all traffic will be coming in your API gateway, I would simply drop the Ingress-controller and enable a Service of Type LoadBalancer for your API gateway pods