What is a Kubernetes Ingress and how does it differ from a Service?

A Service exposes a set of pods internally or as a simple LoadBalancer. An Ingress is a Layer-7 (HTTP/HTTPS) routing rule that sits in front of multiple services and routes traffic based on hostname or path.

Example: Route api.example.com to the api-service and example.com to the frontend-service using a single load balancer IP. This is far more cost-effective than having a separate LoadBalancer service for each microservice.