This is a concept that is at first a little tricky to wrap your head around. The Nginx ingress controller is nothing but a service of type LoadBalancer. What is does is be the public-facing endpoint for your services. The IP address assigned to this service can route traffic to multiple services. So you can go ahead and define your services as ClusterIP and have them exposed through the Nginx ingress controller.

Here's a diagram to portray the concept a little better: image source

On that note, if you have acquired a static IP for your service, you need to assign it to your Nginx ingress-controller. So what is an ingress? Ingress is basically a way for you to communicate to your Nginx ingress-controller how to direct traffic incoming to your LB public IP. So as it is clear now, you have one loadbalancer service, and multiple ingress resources. Each ingress corresponds to a single service that can change based on how you define your services, but you get the idea.

Let's get into some yaml code. As mentioned, you will need the ingress controller service regardless of how many ingress resources you have. So go ahead and apply this code on your EKS cluster.

Now let's see how you would expose your pod to the world through Nginx-ingress. Say you have a wordpress deployment. You can define a simple ClusterIP service for this app:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: ${WORDPRESS_APP}
  namespace: ${NAMESPACE}
  name: ${WORDPRESS_APP}
spec:
  type: ClusterIP
  ports:
  - port: 9000
    targetPort: 9000
    name: ${WORDPRESS_APP}
  - port: 80
    targetPort: 80
    protocol: TCP
    name: http
  - port: 443
    targetPort: 443
    protocol: TCP
    name: https
  selector:
    app: ${WORDPRESS_APP}

This creates a service for your wordpress app which is not accessible outside of the cluster. Now you can create an ingress resource to expose this service:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  namespace: ${NAMESPACE}
  name: ${INGRESS_NAME}
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    kubernetes.io/tls-acme: "true"
spec:
  tls:
  - hosts:
    - ${URL}
    secretName: ${TLS_SECRET}
  rules:
  - host: ${URL}
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: ${WORDPRESS_APP}
          servicePort: 80

Now if you run kubectl get svc you can see the following:

NAME                      TYPE          CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP    PORT(S)                   AGE
wordpress                 ClusterIP     10.23.XXX.XX   <none>         9000/TCP,80/TCP,443/TCP   1m
nginx-ingress-controller  LoadBalancer  10.23.XXX.XX    XX.XX.XXX.XXX  80:X/TCP,443:X/TCP   1m

Now you can access your wordpress service through the URL defined, which maps to the public IP of your ingress controller LB service.