Mastering Ingress Strategies for AWS EKS: ALB vs. Istio vs. NGINX

As Kubernetes continues to dominate the cloud-native ecosystem, managing traffic flow into and within your clusters becomes a critical consideration. In the AWS cloud, EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) offers robust managed Kubernetes, but ingress strategies for both external and internal traffic can be complex to configure based on your application needs.

In this blog post, we will explore three powerful ingress strategies for Kubernetes on AWS EKS:

1. AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) Ingress Controller — best suited for public-facing workloads with AWS-native integrations.
2. Istio Service Mesh — an advanced service-to-service traffic management solution.
3. NGINX Ingress Controller — a flexible, customizable solution for more granular control over ingress traffic.

We’ll cover use cases, detailed configurations, and when to use each based on enterprise requirements.

Scenario 1: AWS ALB Ingress Controller for Public-Facing Traffic

For many organizations, the need to expose Kubernetes applications to the internet is common. This is where AWS ALB (Application Load Balancer) excels. The ALB Ingress Controller allows us to route Layer 7 traffic to services running in an EKS cluster, and integrates natively with AWS services like WAF, Shield, and Route 53.

When to Use AWS ALB Ingress Controller

• Public-facing applications that need to be accessible over the internet.
• SSL termination and AWS certificate management via ACM (AWS Certificate Manager).
• Path-based routing (e.g., /api routes to API service and /web routes to a web app).
• Seamless AWS WAF integration for enhanced security.
• High availability and auto-scaling built into AWS Load Balancers.

Example: ALB Ingress Setup

Let’s walk through the setup process to route traffic to two services based on URL path.

1. Install the AWS ALB Ingress Controller using Helm