Kubernetes is a powerful tool. It can help you manage complex applications and provide you with the ability to easily automate tasks involved in managing them. In this course, we will start exploring Kubernetes from a beginner's standpoint. We will discuss what Kubernetes is and what it does, and we will work with some of the basic functionality of Kubernetes hands-on. We will build a simple Kubernetes cluster. We will also deploy a sample microservice application to the cluster in order to explore how Kubernetes can help easily manage such applications.

A Practical Guide to Kubernetes

# Why Use Ingress Objects?

Applications that are not accessible to users are useless. Kubernetes Services provide accessibility with a usability cost. Each application can be reached through a different port. We **cannot** expect users to know the port of each service in our cluster.

>Ingress objects manage external access to the applications running inside a Kubernetes cluster.

 While, at first glance, it might seem that we already accomplished that through Kubernetes Services, they do not make the applications truly accessible. We still need forwarding rules based on paths and domains, SSL termination and a number of other features. 

In a more traditional setup, we'd probably use an external proxy and a load balancer. Ingress provides an API that allows us to accomplish these things, in addition to a few other features we expect from a dynamic cluster.

We'll explore the problems and the solutions through examples. For now, we need first to create a cluster.
>ℹ️  All the commands from this chapter are available in the [07-ingress.sh](https://gist.github.com/54ef6592bce747ff2d1b089834fc755b) Gist.


# Creating A Cluster

As every other chapter so far, we'll start by creating a Minikube single-node cluster.

Getting Started with Ingress

Why Use Ingress Objects?