This document explains the following topics:
- Ingress class concept.
- How to run NGINX Ingress Controller in the same cluster with another Ingress Controller, such as an Ingress Controller for a cloud HTTP load balancer, and prevent any conflicts between the Ingress Controllers.
- How to run multiple NGINX Ingress Controllers.
The smooth coexistence of multiple Ingress Controllers in one cluster is provided by the Ingress class concept, which mandates the following:
- Every Ingress Controller must only handle Ingress resources for its particular class.
- Ingress resources should be annotated with the
kubernetes.io/ingress.class
annotation set to the value, which corresponds to the class of the Ingress Controller the user wants to use.
The default Ingress class of NGINX Ingress Controller is nginx
, which means that it only handles Ingress resources with the kubernetes.io/ingress.class
annotation set to nginx
. You can customize the class through the -ingress-class
command-line argument.
Note: By default, if the kubernetes.io/ingress.class
annotation is not set in an Ingress resource, the Ingress Controller will handle the resource. This is controlled via the -use-ingress-class-only
argument.
It is possible to run NGINX Ingress Controller and an Ingress Controller for another load balancer in the same cluster. This is often the case if you create your cluster through a cloud provider managed Kubernetes service that by default might include the Ingress Controller for the HTTP load balancer of the cloud provider, and you want to use NGINX Ingress Controller.
To make sure that NGINX Ingress Controller handles particular Ingress resources, annotate those Ingress resources with the kubernetes.io/ingress.class
set to nginx
or the value that you configured.
When running NGINX Ingress Controller, you have the following options with regards to which Ingress resources it handles:
- Cluster-wide Ingress Controller (default). The Ingress Controller handles Ingress resources created in any namespace of the cluster. As NGINX is a high-performance load balancer capable of serving many applications at the same time, this option is used by default in our installation manifests and Helm chart.
- Single-namespace Ingress Controller. You can configure the Ingress Controller to handle Ingress resources only from a particular namespace, which is controlled through the
-watch-namespace
command-line argument. This can be useful if you want to use different NGINX Ingress Controllers for different applications, both in terms of isolation and/or operation. - Ingress Controller for Specific Ingress Class. This option works in conjunction with either of the options above. You can further customize which Ingress resources are handled by the Ingress Controller by configuring the class of the Ingress Controller and using that class in your Ingress resources. See the section Configuring Ingress Class.
Considering the options above, you can run multiple NGINX Ingress Controllers, each handling a different set of Ingress resources.
Note: all mentioned command-line arguments are also available as the parameters in the Helm chart.