NGINX vs. GCE Kubernetes ingress classes

After some further reading and testing, I did find a few benefits. I also realized that using the NGINX controller would still provision a load balancer... thereby not avoiding the ~$20/mo cost.

Differences

• The GCE controller causes an HTTP(S) load balancer to be provisioned
• The NGINX controller requires a service to be designated as type: LoadBalancer
  • Doing this causes a network load balancer to be provisioned

HTTP(S) load balancer

Network load balancer

Benefits:

• As shown in the diagrams above, the HTTP(S) load balancer can load balance across regions, whereas the network load balancer can only load balance across zones in the same region
• The GCE controller is built specifically for Google's Cloud Platform, so I assume it works more reliably
• The default GCE controller requires no extra effort compared to maintaining and specifying the YAML files required for the NGINX controller to function