<p>I would like to know what is/are differences between an <strong>api gateway</strong> and <strong>Ingress controller</strong>. People tend to use these terms interchangeably due to similar functionality they offer. When I say, '<em>Ingress controller</em>'; don't confuse it with <strong>Ingress</strong> objects provided by kubernetes. Also, it would be nice if you can explain the scenario where one will be more useful than other.</p>

<p>Is api gateway a generic term used for traffic routers in cloud-native world and 'Ingress controller' is implementation of api-gateway in kubernetes world? </p>

<p>Ingress controller allows single ip-port to access all services running in k8s through ingress rules. The ingress controller service is set to load balancer so it is accessible from public internet.</p>

<p>An api gateway is used for application routing, rate limiting, security, request and response handling and other application related tasks. Say, you have a microservice based application in which the request needs an information to be collected from multiple micro services. You need a way to distribute the user requests to different services and gather the responses from all micro services and prepare the final response to be sent to the user. API Gateway is the one which does this kind of work for you.</p>
