# About

Type of document: Reference
Product: NGINX Ingress Controller

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This document describes the F5 NGINX Ingress Controller, an Ingress Controller implementation for NGINX and NGINX Plus.

NGINX Ingress Controller is an [Ingress Controller](/glossary/#k8s-ingress-controller) implementation for [NGINX](https://nginx.org) and [NGINX Plus](https://www.f5.com/products/nginx/nginx-plus) that can load balance Websocket, gRPC, TCP and UDP applications. NGINX Ingress Controller gives you a way to manage NGINX through the [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/) API, and is built to handle the continuous change that happens in Kubernetes environments.

It supports standard [Ingress](/glossary/#k8s-ingress-controller) features such as content-based routing and TLS/SSL termination. Several NGINX and NGINX Plus features are available as extensions to Ingress resources through [Annotations](/nic/configuration/ingress-resources/advanced-configuration-with-annotations) and the [ConfigMap](/nic/configuration/global-configuration/configmap-resource) resource.

NGINX Ingress Controller supports the [VirtualServer and VirtualServerRoute resources](/nic/configuration/virtualserver-and-virtualserverroute-resources) as alternatives to Ingress, enabling traffic splitting and advanced content-based routing. It also supports TCP, UDP and TLS Passthrough load balancing using [TransportServer resources](/nic/configuration/transportserver-resource).

To learn more about NGINX Ingress Controller, please read the [The design of NGINX Ingress Controller](/nic/overview/design.md) and [Extensibility with NGINX Plus](/nic/overview/nginx-plus.md) topics.