OpenShift also supports the concept of ingress as it is built on top of Kubernetes. Like an ingress the concept of an OpenShift route is just a way of directing external traffic towards your cluster.

An OpenShift route however only supports HTTP/HTTPS traffic. The router is essentially HAProxy running within a Pod(s) within the cluster which handles traffic to the route. Typically TLS is edge terminated at the router and the request between the router and the destination IP is over HTTP. However you can configure your route to deal with TLS within the application itself.

When a HTTP/HTTPS request hits the router it uses the service name to get a list of Pod IP addresses which are fronted by the service and sends traffic directly to the Pod IP over the software defined network.