Nginx vs. Traefik vs. HAProxy: Comparing Kubernetes Ingress Controllers

if you're brand new to kubernetes or if you've been using it for a while then you've probably come across the concept of Ingress controllers picking an Ingress controller is an important part of the journey and there are a bunch of options out there so today we're going to take a quick look at three of them engine X traffic and ha proxy the question you probably have is which one should I pick well I'll give you a spoiler it depends on your use case and which features you need so let's go ahead and jump right in and take a look at the three different Ingress [Music] controllers we're going to start out with engine X engine X is what I started using when I got into kubernetes inex Ingress controller at a high level here's a diagram you can head over to their documentation to check this out some of the benefits of inex is it's fast there's lots of coverage for users who are used to it so if someone's been using engine X for virtual machines or they've used it previously they can kind of understand the configuration pretty easily there's lots of documentation around it it has been out for a while there is a version of it that is supported by the kubernetes project so it'll be very helpful to get in get used to using it ask questions like there's a lot of documentation around it compared to some of the other Ingress controllers like I said it's documented well across other projects so other projects that you install such as like V cluster uh have documented how to use an engine X Ingress controller for your Ingress controller when you're when you're setting up different things one of the standards for people that are getting started because it's it's used across so many different projects next up we're going to look at traffic so traffic one of the biggest selling points of traffic for me when when I was messing around with it is it has a UI so if we check out the UI real quick there's a user interface if you're used to having a UI for setting up these kind of things then you may want look at traffic as an option there is a free version that you can use you can install the dashboard you can get everything working so here's a overview of traffic so traffic may have more features that you're that you're interested in beyond what engine X has there may be some trade-offs that you're looking at for using traffic instead it is born in the cloud as they say so this was specifically designed for cloud native applications whereas engine X is kind of using a configuration file that you would see normally on a virtual machine or different infrastructure and then let's check check out ha proxy so if you look at some of the Benchmark tests ha proxy comes out ahead in a lot of different things so it's fast some overlap coming from other infrastructure if you're used to using ha proxy so maybe you know how to configure it and you've got a lot of background on how to use it so performs very well under low testing it's very fast and it's very performant if if you're looking for something like that now something to think about when you're picking one of these there there's a lot of things that overlap that you can use that are similar there are many things that they add in that are features that are different and there are some things that just aren't included in some of the features at all now without showing you a complete graph of what what's included and what's not in each one what you're going to want to do is maybe test out each one to see what performance you want go look at some of the Benchmark tests or what you can do is see what your group is interested in using so if your group is used to configuring engine X then they may be able to troubleshoot a little bit easier if they haven't used any of these before maybe go into traffic so that you've got a UI for everything if you're just worried about Speed and Performance instead of thinking about like what one maybe supported better in the community look at AJ proxy right like if you're used to using that in the past and maybe something that you want to use again again in the future and then if you're going to be using these on production workloads and you eventually want to buy support or you want to pay for something you should look at what features are offered in the paid version to see if those are relevant to you all of these have great feature sets in the community version but you may be looking at some of those Advanced features that you need in the paid version so that's something to think about when you're picking this but really at the end of the day they're all so similar that it depends on what your use case is what your users are comfortable with using and which one you can get support for the easiest right like if you can get easier support for inine X in the community or everything that you're working on or trying to install is documented in inine X then you're probably going to have an easier time getting started and then maybe in the future if you if you realize these other feature sets that you need you can go back and you can reassess and figure out which one you want now some of the cool things about these uh Ingress controllers and the community support and them being open source is that new features are added all the time so say you haven't used engine X in a very long time maybe you switched over and you just started using traffic well maybe there's some new features that have been added recently right like kubernetes has added base features to make things easier like being able to use annotations to get certificates and stuff like that so maybe it's time to reassess take a look at what you're using currently and then go check out some of the benchmarks and see which one comes ahead and maybe it's time to try ha proxy maybe it's time to try one of the different ones at the end of the day you're probably just going to use what your team is most comfortable with using and your users you may switch if you need other features after you've hit the limitations of the one that you're currently using but more than likely you're probably either going to start with engine X and stay with engine X maybe start with tra and stay with traffic or even start with ha proxy and stay there but keep in mind these projects are always moving and changing and there may be features to get added to the open source version that you're interested in using so when it's time to reassess go check out each one see what new features have been added maybe see what your use cases are if you've matured in your usage and you're looking for something that is beyond htttp and you're looking at UDP or TCP or something like that maybe one of these has got an easier configuration for you but that's something to think about and thank you for watching and if you have any questions or if you want to see some of our documentation cover different Ingress controllers that we're not talking about here let us know join our slack uh join the community and reach out to us in the v cluster Channel or reach out to me and Peterson on our Loft Community slack I hope you got something useful out of this and look for future videos to see how we set up traffic with v cluster and ha proxy with v cluster right now we've got a video for engine X and if you're interested in taking the next step in setting up V cluster with engine X check out the video in the description

Channel: Loft Labs

Views: 683

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Id: W5eyg0jS37Y

Length: 5min 29sec (329 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024