# Ingress Controller An ingress controller functions as a reverse proxy and load balancer, implementing a Kubernetes Ingress. It adds an abstraction layer for traffic routing by receiving traffic from outside the Kubernetes platform and load balancing it to Pods running within the Kubernetes cluster. {% hint style="info" %} **Note**: Seldon Enterprise Platform does not support NGINX as an alternative for Istio. {% endhint %} The Seldon Enterprise Platform supports Istio ingress controllers. Seldon Core 1 and Seldon Core 2 integrate most effectively with an Istio ingress controller in your Seldon Enterprise Platform ecosystem. This table lists the features and the ingress controllers for Seldon Core 1 and Seldon Core 2.
Seldon Core 1Seldon Core 2
The features of Seldon Core 1 does not function without the Istio ingress controller.Seldon Core 2 is by design service mesh-agnostic and as a result you can choose any ingress controller you want. However, If you choose a non-Istio ingress controller it may restrict you to the more basic or limited functionality of Seldon Core 2.
Seldon Core uses Istio because it relies on a service mesh for traffic splitting and leverages Knative for drift and outlier detection, as well as inference event logging.Seldon Core 2 offers features such as multi-model serving and overcommit functionality and uses Kafka as a message queue for data-centric pipelines. These features work best with Istio ingress controller.
### Features of Istio ingress controller * Service mesh with advanced traffic management capabilities. * Required for effective use of Seldon Core 1. * Automatic configuration of ingress routes for Seldon Core 1 deployments. * Enables authorization of Seldon Core 1 deployments. * Manages traffic for rollout strategies, drift and outlier detection, and inference data logging for Seldon Core 1. * Supports both HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 (gRPC) traffic. * Provides TLS support for HTTPS and gRPCS. * Supports ingress routes for ML deployments.