Mastering Kubernetes Ingress: From Basics to MSE Cloud Native Gateway

Kubernetes clusters isolate internal services from external clients, so an entry point—an ingress—is required to expose services outside the cluster. The three common approaches are NodePort, LoadBalancer, and Ingress, with Ingress operating at layer 7 and supporting virtual‑host and path‑based routing.

Ingress abstracts external traffic management, allowing a single Ingress Provider to implement routing rules for many services, reducing port usage and enabling centralized access control, observability, and logging.

The widely used Nginx Ingress Controller consists of a controller that watches Ingress resources via the API server and generates Nginx configuration files, which are reloaded without restarting the data plane.

Alibaba Cloud’s MSE Ingress Controller extends the standard Ingress model with hot‑update, multi‑cluster management, lower cost, and built‑in security and monitoring. It can listen to Ingress resources from multiple ACK clusters and apply routing rules instantly.

Prerequisites

An MSE Cloud Native Gateway instance

An ACK (Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes) cluster

Step 1: Bind ACK cluster and enable Ingress listening

In the MSE console, navigate to Service Management → Source Management, associate the ACK cluster, enable listening for Kubernetes Ingress, and configure the IngressClass and target namespace.

Step 2: Deploy a sample service

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: httpbin
  labels:
    app: httpbin
    service: httpbin
spec:
  ports:
  - name: http
    port: 8000
    targetPort: 80
  selector:
    app: httpbin
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: httpbin
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: httpbin
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: httpbin
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: mse-gw-demo-registry.cn-hangzhou.cr.aliyuncs.com/gw/httpbin
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        name: httpbin
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80

Step 3: Create an Ingress resource

For ACK versions prior to 1.19:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-demo
spec:
  rules:
  - host: test.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /ip
        backend:
          serviceName: httpbin
          servicePort: 8000

For ACK 1.19 and later:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-demo
spec:
  rules:
  - host: test.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /ip
        pathType: Exact
        backend:
          service:
            name: httpbin
            port:
              number: 8000

Step 4: Access the service

Obtain the gateway IP from the MSE console and test with curl: curl -H "host: test.com" 47.97.127.61/ip Expected JSON response:

{
  "origin": "x.x.x.x"
}

Step 5: Verify domain and routing configuration

The MSE console displays the registered domain and the routing rules derived from the Ingress manifest.

By using MSE Ingress Controller, traffic is routed efficiently, multi‑cluster ingress is supported, and configuration updates take effect instantly without restarting the data plane, providing a robust and cost‑effective solution for cloud‑native applications.