What is ingress in the context of Envoy?

Ingress in the context of Envoy refers to the management of incoming traffic into a cluster or service. This concept is crucial for controlling how external requests are processed and routed to the appropriate backend services. Envoy acts as an ingress proxy, facilitating efficient routing, load balancing, and service discovery for the incoming requests.

By utilizing features such as filtering, traffic control, and routing rules, Envoy can intelligently manage the flow of traffic from outside the service mesh to the appropriate services within the cluster. This ensures that requests are handled in a performant and secure manner, making ingress a foundational component in cloud-native architectures and microservices environments.

Other options do not accurately represent the functionality of ingress in this context. For example, outgoing traffic is more about egress management, while load balancing among services pertains to internal traffic distribution rather than specifically addressing incoming external traffic. Monitoring security threats, although important, falls under a different programming domain related to network security and not directly under the concept of ingress management.