What is the primary purpose of creating an AKS Ingress controller?

The primary purpose of creating an AKS Ingress controller is to establish a reverse proxy and facilitate TLS termination for services running within an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. An Ingress controller allows external HTTP/S traffic to access services inside the cluster, managing the routing of this traffic based on defined rules. It effectively provides a single entry point for clients to interact with multiple services, which can simplify management and improve efficiency.

The Ingress controller can handle TLS termination by terminating TLS connections and forwarding requests to backend services over HTTP. This is beneficial for simplifying the management of SSL certificates and ensuring that encrypted communication is established between the clients and the Ingress controller before traffic is routed inside the cluster.

In contrast, while enhancing cluster performance and scalability, monitoring the health of Kubernetes nodes, and configuring network security are essential aspects of managing Kubernetes environments, they do not specifically relate to the core functionality that an Ingress controller provides in terms of handling external traffic and traffic routing.