How to Expose Your Application on AWS EKS Using the AWS Load Balancer Controller

In this blog, we will cover the process of exposing your Kubernetes application to the internet using the AWS Load Balancer Controller on EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service). We will review what the AWS Load Balancer Controller does, its architecture, and guide you through its installation process with Helm.

What is AWS Load Balancer Controller?

The AWS Load Balancer Controller is a Kubernetes controller that automatically manages AWS Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) for your Kubernetes clusters. It works by monitoring your Kubernetes Ingress and Service resources.

Based on these resources, it creates the necessary load balancers on AWS and manages them for you. The primary advantage is that you don’t have to manually set up and manage Elastic Load Balancers. The controller simplifies your job by generating a single DNS name (or IP) pointing to multiple services within your cluster.

Architecture Overview

1. The controller interacts with users and AWS services, creating load balancers for your cluster’s ingress resources.
2. The traffic passes through the Amazon Load Balancer, which routes it to the relevant Kubernetes pods in your EKS cluster.
3. This eliminates the need for manual configuration of load balancers for your Kubernetes services.