[shane_siebken]

I'd say that's primarily because those load balancers (assuming some like a Network Load Balancer in AWS for example) are not integrated in the k8s network stack. Cloud load balancers are absolutely an important part of delivering network traffic to your cluster, but the ingress controllers have to "know" a bit more about cluster network topology to serve the purpose they serve. That is, taking incoming traffic from node(s) at a common port and sending it on to a particular service in the cluster.

[renke1]

I was thinking about AWS's Application Load Balancer which already has some kind of rules similar to ingress resources in K8S. I think the LB in Digital Ocean has something similar as well. Having to run (multiple) ingress controller instances in your cluster seems like a waste of resources. Also, if ingress controller specific functionality is used, are ingress resources even the right abstraction?

[p_l]

AWS ALB is exposed as Ingress through alb-ingress-controller. NLB is exposed through Service objects which correspond to L4 load balancers (with Type=LoadBalancer set)