<p>An ingress controller is a Layer 7 construct. Does it bypass the Service (VIP) and Layer 4 kube proxy?</p>

<p>In a nutshell: Ingress deals with North-South traffic (bringing traffic from the outside world into the cluster), a service acts a load balancer, routing the traffic to one of its pods. So, if I understand your question correctly, the answer is no: Ingress and services work together to get traffic from a client outside of the cluster to a certain pod.</p>

<p>You can read more about the topic in an excellent blog post series by Mark Betz (linked from <a href="https://mhausenblas.info/cn-ref/" rel="noreferrer">here</a>, in the "3rd-party articles" section).</p>
