PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF INGRESS CONTROLLERS ON KUBERNETES CLUSTER

Abstract

Nowadays, there are many methods for load balancing on container clustering using Kubernetes which have a different operation and feature. Thus, this article presents an installation and test of layer-7 load balance controller which functions as an HTTP/HTTPS load balancer for accessing service on Kubernetes containers cluster. There are 4 types as follows: 1) Nginx Ingress controller 2) Traefik Ingress controller 3) Voyager Ingress controller 4) GCE L7 load balancer controller (GLBC). The study will evaluate and compare the performance and efficiency based on traffic throughput and responses time.

The results from this study revealed that the most efficient method in case of throughput is GCE L7 load balancer controller (GLBC) with accounting rate for more than 5,000 requests/second. Traefik Ingress controller, Voyager Ingress controller and Nginx Ingress controller can be accountable for 2,600, 2,560, 2,200 requests/second, respectively. Regarding the response time, it was found that GCE L7 load balancer controller (GLBC) takes the least time to response, followed by Traefik Ingress controller, Voyager Ingress controller, and Nginx Ingress controller, respectively. Additionally, the response time has a high tendency depending on the requests per time unit. However, GCE L7 load balancer controller (GLBC) is the best option for public cloud (Google cloud platform) in terms of its convenience since it was already installed on Google Kubernetes Engines without additional Ingress Controller installation.