<p>Is it possible to have a fallback service for Kubernetes ingresses in the event that none of the normal pods are live/ready? In other words, how would you go about presenting a friendly "website down" page to visitors if all pods crashed or went down somehow?</p>

<p>Right now, a page appears that says "default backend - 404" if that happens.</p>

<p>Here's what we tried, to no avail:</p>

<pre><code>apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: example-ingress
spec:
  backend:
    serviceName: website-down-service
    servicePort: 80
  rules:
    - host: example.com
      http:
        paths:
          - path: /
            backend:
              serviceName: example-service
              servicePort: 80
</code></pre>

<p>For reference, we're testing locally with Minikube and deploying to the cloud on Google's Container Engine.</p>

<p>If using Nginx then <a href="https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx/user-guide/nginx-configuration/annotations/#default-backend" rel="nofollow noreferrer">default backend</a> annotation should do the trick, sample:</p>
<pre><code>apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: ingress-name
  namespace: your-namespace
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/default-backend: fallback-backend
spec:
   &lt;your spec here&gt;
</code></pre>
