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…