Kubernetes Ingress Compression

Enabling Gzip/Brotli in ingress-nginx

Mon Jun 12 2023

I ran a few tests on this site with Lighthouse and realized that I hadn’t enabled text compression, so I looked into how to do that with the Kubernetes ingress-nginx controller that serves it. It was super simple I just had to add some settings to the ConfigMap for the ingress controller.

Use the following to get a copy of the existing controller configuration:

kubectl get configmap ingress-nginx-controller -n ingress-nginx -o yaml

Edit the file to add use-gzip: "true" and enable-brotli: "true":

apiVersion: v1
data:
  allow-snippet-annotations: "true"
  use-proxy-protocol: "true"
  use-gzip: "true"
  enable-brotli: "true"
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: ingress-nginx-controller
  namespace: ingress-nginx

Apply the configuration change:

kubectl apply -f configmap-ingress-nginx-controller.yml

Bingo Bango! We have compression happening when I look at the Network tab in Chrome Devtools:

It was an easy win!