One thing I keep noticing in Kubernetes environments is how quickly authentication becomes difficult to manage once multiple internal services and dashboards are involved.

At first, exposing applications through Ingress feels straightforward.

But as clusters grow, teams usually end up solving authentication separately for different applications, which slowly turns into duplicated configuration and inconsistent access control across environments.

The part that makes this setup useful is that authentication gets handled closer to the ingress layer instead of inside every application separately.

Using OAuth2 Proxy with NGINX Ingress makes it possible to centralize authentication using providers like GitHub or Google while keeping internal services much simpler.

I came across a useful walkthrough covering this setup here:

https://www.kubeblogs.com/authentication-with-oauth2-proxy-and-nginx-ingress-on-kubernetes/