Kubernetes Ingress controller vs kube-proxy

Question

An ingress controller is a Layer 7 construct. Does it bypass the Service (VIP) and Layer 4 kube proxy?

Answer 1

In a nutshell: Ingress deals with North-South traffic (bringing traffic from the outside world into the cluster), a service acts a load balancer, routing the traffic to one of its pods. So, if I understand your question correctly, the answer is no: Ingress and services work together to get traffic from a client outside of the cluster to a certain pod.

You can read more about the topic in an excellent blog post series by Mark Betz (linked from here, in the "3rd-party articles" section).