This recipe showed you how to quickly create a cloud load balancer to expose your services with an external address.

In the Creating a cloud load balancer recipe, in Step 3, when a load balancer service is created in Kubernetes, a cloud provider load balancer is created on your behalf without you having to go through the cloud service provider APIs separately. This feature helps you easily manage the creation of load balancers outside of your Kubernetes cluster, but at the same takes a bit of time to complete and requires a separate load balancer for every service, so this might be costly and not very flexible. 

To give load balancers flexibility and add more application-level functionality, you can use ingress controllers. Using ingress, traffic routing can be controlled by rules defined in the ingress resource. You will learn more about popular ingress gateways in the next two recipes, Creating an ingress service and service mesh using Istio and Creating an ingress service and service mesh using Linkerd.