I have deployed my application in a cluster of 3 nodes. Now to make this application externally accessible, I have followed this documentation and integrated nginx ingress controller.
Now when I checked my Google's Load Balancer console, I can see a new load balancer created and everything works fine. But the strange thing is I found two of my nodes are unhealthy and only one node is accepting connection. Then I found this discussion and understood that the only node running nginx ingress controller pod will be healthy for load balancer.
Now I feel hard to understand this data flow and the use of external load balancer here. We use external load balancer to balance the load to multiple machines. But with this configuration external load balancer will always forward traffic to the node with nginx ingress controller pod. If that is correct, what is the role of external load balance here?
You can have more than one replica of the Nginx ingress controller pods deployed across more than one kubernetes nodes for high availability purpose to reduce the possibility of downtime in case one kubernetes node is unavailable. The LoadBalancer will send the request to one of those nginx ingress Controller pods. From nginx ingress controller pods it will forwarded to any of the backend pods. The role of the external load balancer is to expose nginx ingress controller pods outside the cluster. Because NodePort is not recommended for usage in production and ClusterIP can not be used expose pods outside the cluster, hence LoadBalancer is the viable option.