F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services vs NGINX Ingress Controller

F5 BIG-IP Container Ingress Services (CIS) connects Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift environments with F5 BIG-IP. It watches Kubernetes resources and adjusts BIG-IP configuration as applications change, while teams manage BIG-IP through Kubernetes or OpenShift command-line interfaces and APIs. CIS can send traffic from BIG-IP to clusters through NodePort or ClusterIP and supports F5 AS3 declarations. It provides HTTP and URI routing, load balancing, scaling, health monitoring, and Blue/Green or A/B traffic handling. F5 documents Ingress resources, OpenShift Routes, IngressLink coordination with NGINX Ingress Controller, and overlays including OpenShift SDN, Flannel, and Calico. BIG-IP data streams can export application and network statistics to tools such as Splunk. Installation is available through Helm or manual methods, with releases on Docker Hub and Red Hat Container Registry. The open-source plan is free, but requires a licensed BIG-IP system, a Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster, and AS3 installed on BIG-IP.

NGINX Ingress Controller is a self-hosted Kubernetes Ingress Controller for load balancing WebSocket, gRPC, TCP, and UDP applications. It provides content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination, with further NGINX settings exposed through annotations and ConfigMaps. Manifest installation can use Deployment, DaemonSet, or StatefulSet modes. Policy resources cover access control, rate limiting, API keys, authentication, mutual TLS, WAF, CORS, and HSTS, although some require NGINX Plus. The controller can expose NGINX and controller metrics in Prometheus format, including a ServiceMonitor with Prometheus Operator. Documented integrations include cert-manager, ExternalDNS, Prometheus, Istio, Linkerd, Open Service Mesh, and F5 products. The free NGINX Open Source plan costs nothing and requires a Kubernetes cluster. NGINX Plus requires a subscription and registry credentials, and adds metrics, balancing methods, persistence, health checks, and JWT validation.