<p>what is the difference between kube-nginx (here i am not talking about nginx ingress controller)  and kube-proxy ? </p>

<p>i've seen a recent deployment that all nodes in the cluster are running 1 kube-proxy (which is used for accessing services running in the nodes according to <a href="https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/proxies/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/proxies/</a>)  and 1 kube-nginx pod, so they are used for different purposes.</p>

<p>As mentioned by community above and <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/blob/master/docs/ha-mode.md" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>K8s components require a loadbalancer to access the apiservers via a reverse proxy. Kubespray includes support for an nginx-based proxy that resides on each non-master Kubernetes node. This is referred to as localhost loadbalancing. It is less efficient than a dedicated load balancer because it creates extra health checks on the Kubernetes apiserver, but is more practical for scenarios where an external LB or virtual IP management is inconvenient. This option is configured by the variable loadbalancer_apiserver_localhost (defaults to True. Or False, if there is an external loadbalancer_apiserver defined). You may also define the port the local internal loadbalancer uses by changing, loadbalancer_apiserver_port. This defaults to the value of kube_apiserver_port. It is also important to note that Kubespray will only configure kubelet and kube-proxy on non-master nodes to use the local internal loadbalancer.</p>
</blockquote>
