[icedchai]

It is complicated. This article doesn't explain things conceptually... it's more copy-and-paste and very GCP specific. It also doesn't explain how to use any of the stuff you set up, like cert-manager or the ingress. How about a sample app deployment?

Also, you don't "need" an ingress if you just want to expose a single service. A service can use a load balancer directly.

You don't need an "external" load balancer: you can use MetalLB.

[pddp11]

While certain aspects of the article are GCP specific, part of the motivation of using ingress-nginx and cert-manager is to make the solution more generically applicable to _any_ Kubernetes cluster. The specific commands used to spin up the infrastructure, the workload identity configuration so cert-manager and external-dns can manage DNS records, and the specific configuration of external-dns are specific to this implementation, but the concepts and approach are generally applicable.

There are many resources already available explaining how to deploy applications to Kubernetes. I don't think this article would be significantly enhanced by adding another example of that. I have added some links to other tutorials if people are interested.

While it is true that ingresses are not required, they do provide a useful abstraction, can afford significant cost savings, and can improve security over load balancer services. I would recommend becoming familiar with them and using them.