Managing Kubernetes Ingress Resources on Amazon EKS with AWS CLI

The cluster was failing, and no one knew why. Traffic should have been flowing through the gateway, but the pods sat in silence. Minutes felt like hours until someone checked the ingress resources. That’s when the problem became clear—wrong rules, wrong paths, wrong annotations.

AWS CLI can turn a situation like that around fast. Instead of digging through consoles and endless clicks, you can inspect and manage ingress resources straight from your terminal. With the right commands, you can list them, describe them, and even modify or delete them without opening a browser.

When working with Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, ingress resources define how external requests reach services in your cluster. They map hosts and paths to the right backend services, often with an ingress controller like AWS Load Balancer Controller or NGINX. The AWS CLI gives you direct access to the Kubernetes API through kubectl while leveraging AWS’s authentication and context management.

A simple way to start:

aws eks update-kubeconfig --name my-cluster --region us-east-1
kubectl get ingress

This connects your AWS CLI to your EKS cluster and shows the active ingress resources. You’ll see names, hosts, and the age of each resource.

To inspect one in depth:

kubectl describe ingress my-ingress

This reveals the routing rules, associated services, annotations for SSL termination, and details on load balancers provisioned by AWS. If requests aren’t landing where they should, this is the place to look.

Updating an ingress can be done by editing the manifest and applying it directly:

kubectl apply -f updated-ingress.yaml

The AWS CLI can also help monitor changes. Pair it with kubectl watch commands or automation scripts to detect misconfigurations fast. This avoids downtime, failed deployments, and costly debugging time.

If many clusters or environments rely on ingress resources, the AWS CLI makes switching between contexts trivial:

aws eks update-kubeconfig --name staging-cluster --region us-west-2

Now you can manage ingress rules for any environment from one terminal. No tabs. No extra clicks.

Automation with AWS CLI means ingress resources stay accurate and aligned with infrastructure as code practices. It reduces drift, enforces version control, and ensures promotion through environments is predictable.

Ingress resources are the front door to your services. AWS CLI is the master key to controlling them.

You can see these workflows in action, connected to live resources, without setting up a single piece of infrastructure yourself. Sign up at hoop.dev and you’ll have a live environment in minutes—ready to test, tweak, and control ingress resources with the AWS CLI.