Stop Exposing Your Apps With LoadBalancer Services — Embrace Ingress and Gateway API

When teams first start deploying workloads on Kubernetes, one of the most common ways to expose an app to the outside world is using a Service of type LoadBalancer. It works. It’s fast. It’s easy.
But as your cluster grows, your network gets messy. Your cloud bill grows faster than your team. And worse, you lose all centralized control over how traffic enters your platform.

Let me cut to the chase:

Using type: LoadBalancer for every service is a sign of early-stage Kubernetes maturity. If you're still doing it at scale — it's time for an intervention.

1. The Hidden Cost of LoadBalancers

Every Service of type LoadBalancer typically provisions:

• A dedicated cloud load balancer (AWS ELB, GCP forwarding rule, etc.)
• A new external IP
• An associated health check

On AWS or Azure, this means money.
On GKE or AKS, this means resource quotas.

I’ve seen teams with 30+ services unknowingly racking up thousands in monthly cloud spend — just because each one got its own LoadBalancer.

That’s not architecture. That’s defaulting to convenience at the expense of control.

2. Operational Overhead and Traffic Fragmentation

Beyond cost, there’s a bigger problem: every LoadBalancer becomes its own isolated gateway. This means:

• No central place to apply rate limits or authentication
• No shared TLS termination
• No unified observability
• Every service manages its own DNS, certs, health checks, firewall rules...

In other words: you’ve built a fleet of tiny silos instead of a platform.

3. Enter Ingress (and Gateway API)

The Kubernetes Ingress object was designed to solve exactly this. Instead of exposing every service individually, you:

• Route all traffic through one (or a few) shared entry points
• Use a reverse proxy (like NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy, etc.) as an Ingress controller
• Define path-based or host-based rules in your cluster

This gives you:

• Central TLS management (cert-manager or Let’s Encrypt)
• Unified routing config
• Better integration with monitoring and WAFs

And if you're moving to Gateway API — the new evolution of Ingress — you get:

• Better separation of concerns (infra vs. app)
• CRDs for routes, listeners, policies, etc.
• More portability across vendors

4. But… Writing Ingress YAML Sucks

Let’s be honest: writing a Kubernetes Ingress manifest is a pain.

Here’s what a basic one looks like:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: my-app-ingress
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /
spec:
  rules:
    - host: myapp.example.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: my-app-service
                port:
                  number: 80

Not exactly readable. Now scale that to 15 services, each with their own domains, paths, and TLS certs.

5. Build a Real Entry Layer — Not a Patchwork

If you want to build a platform, you need to think like one.

Ingress (or Gateway API) gives you:

• A single place to enforce security
• Consistent routing
• Easier automation
• Better observability (through centralized metrics and logs)

It also lets your infrastructure team own the edge, while app teams just define what they need — without stepping on each other.

That’s alignment. That’s scalability.

Final Thoughts

type: LoadBalancer is fine for prototypes and early-stage apps. But if you’re running production workloads, managing multiple teams, or just want lower cloud bills and higher consistency, Ingress or Gateway API is the way forward.

Because edge traffic isn’t just about reaching your app — it’s about controlling it, securing it, and scaling it.