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Decide on Kubernetes Ingress Controller(s)

Recommendation​

With EKS Auto Mode, AWS natively manages the load balancer controller as part of the cluster. There is no need to deploy a separate ingress controller — Auto Mode handles ALB and NLB provisioning automatically based on Ingress and Service annotations.

The eks/ingress-class component configures the default Kubernetes IngressClass for ALB-based routing. It automatically detects whether Auto Mode is enabled via the eks/cluster component state and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Considerations​

Kubernetes supports any number of ingress controllers deployed multiple times. With EKS Auto Mode, the AWS load balancer controller is built-in and requires no manual deployment or lifecycle management.

Key benefits of the Auto Mode approach:

  • No Helm chart to manage — the controller is provisioned and upgraded by AWS as part of the cluster
  • Native ALB/NLB support — ALBs and NLBs are provisioned based on standard Kubernetes Ingress and Service annotations, including WAF integration
  • ACM certificates — TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager are supported natively via annotations
  • Simplified operations — no controller pods to monitor, scale, or troubleshoot
TLS terminates at the ALB. It's then optionally re-encrypted if the downstream services support it, such

as with self-signed certificates and a TLS sidecar like Envoy or Nginx. Without this, traffic is in clear-text between the ALB and the downstream service or pod.

Legacy Approach​

Prior to EKS Auto Mode, the reference architecture deployed the aws-loadbalancer-controller (aka aws-alb-ingress-controller v2) as a self-managed Helm chart via the eks/alb-controller component, with eks/alb-controller-ingress-group to create shared ALBs. These components have been removed from the scaffold in favor of Auto Mode. See the migration notes for details.