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Volcengine Kubernetes Engine

Network add-ons

alb-ingress-controller

alb-ingress-controller is an Ingress controller add-on that provides Layer 7 traffic access and routing management capabilities based on Application Load Balancer (ALB). This topic describes how to install and upgrade the alb-ingress-controller add-on and provides relevant considerations.

Add-on overview

alb-ingress-controller is the core Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) traffic gateway add-on provided by VKE for cloud-native scenarios. It deeply integrates ALB capabilities, monitors and parses Ingress configurations, and dynamically converts these configurations into ALB forwarding rules. Compared with the native Nginx Ingress, this add-on delivers superior performance and stability while eliminating the burden of separate O&M on gateway nodes. It provides a robust north-south application traffic management solution.

As a managed add-on, it does not run additional Controller Pod workloads in your business cluster or consume computing resources on nodes. After the add-on is installed, the following CRD is created in your cluster:

Resource name	Resource type	Resource description
albinstance	CRD	The CRD resource that manages and monitors the lifecycle of ALB instances. For details, see Creating ALB Ingresses by using kubectl.

tip

The preceding table only lists the main resources of the add-on, as well as resources that may be used when the add-on or the corresponding feature is configured. This helps you understand the main components of this add-on. Other resources, such as ConfigMap and Secret, related to the add-on are not described here. The actual resources in the cluster shall prevail.

Installing add-ons

This add-on is mandatory for clusters. It is automatically installed upon cluster creation, requiring no manual installation.

Upgrading add-ons

The add-on is released in new versions at irregular intervals to provide new features or fix known bugs. When the add-on card displays that a new version is available, we recommend upgrading the add-on promptly. To ensure a smooth business transition, we recommend upgrading the add-on during business off-peak hours. For upgrade procedures and considerations, see Upgrading add-ons.