[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.