gke nginx ingress create additional load balancer - nginx

Question

I have a set of services that i want to expose as an ingress load balancer. I select nginx to be the ingress because of the ability to force http to https redirects.
Having an ingress config like
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: api-https
annotations:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: true
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/force-ssl-redirect: true
nginx.org/ssl-services: "api,spa"
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
spec:
tls:
- hosts:
- api.some.com
- www.some.com
secretName: secret
rules:
- host: api.some.com
http:
paths:
- path: /
backend:
serviceName: api
servicePort: 8080
- host: www.some.com
http:
paths:
- path: /
backend:
serviceName: spa
servicePort: 8081
gke creates the nginx ingress load balancer but also another load balancer with backends and everything like if where not nginx selected but gcp as ingress.
below screenshot shows in red the two unexpected LB and in blue the two nginx ingress LB one for our qa and prod env respectively.
output from kubectl get services
xyz#cloudshell:~ (xyz)$ kubectl get services
NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
api NodePort 1.2.3.4 <none> 8080:32332/TCP,4433:31866/TCP 10d
nginx-ingress-controller LoadBalancer 1.2.6.9 12.13.14.15 80:32321/TCP,443:32514/TCP 2d
nginx-ingress-default-backend ClusterIP 1.2.7.10 <none> 80/TCP 2d
spa NodePort 1.2.8.11 <none> 8082:31847/TCP,4435:31116/TCP 6d
screenshot from gcp gke services view of the ingress with wrong info
Is this expected?
Did i miss any configuration to prevent this extra load balancer for been created?

Answer 1

On GCP GKE the gcp ingress controller its enabled by default and will be always lead to a new LB in any ingress definition even if the .class its specified.
https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/3703
So to fix it we should remove the gcp ingress controller from the cluster as mention on https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-gce/blob/master/docs/faq/gce.md#how-do-i-disable-the-gce-ingress-controller

Answer 2

When you create a deployment on GKE cluster, you have two possibilities to expose it:
Use a Service with a type LoadBalancer and expose it - this will
create a TCP load balancer
Create a Service as a NodePort or a Cluster
IP and expose it as an Ingress - this will create HTTP load balancer
If you can see both of them in Load Balancers, this means that you have probably created a Service type LoadBalancer and then exposed it as Ingress. You are opening the same deployment to be accessed from two different IPs, by service and Ingress. To confirm this try:
$ kubectl get ingress
$ kubectl get svc
You will get 2 ips from these 2 commands and they will both show you the same page.
Better way to configure it is to have a service type NodePort, and expose that service as an ingress. This is especially useful because you can use the same ingress for exposing more services.
This way you are saving the number of IPs exposed (and saving money by not using several Load Balancers).