I was wondering if the ingress controller of GKE comes either any additional costs, like a Google Cloud LoadBalancer, and if so is it possible to expose services with an ingress controller without the Google Cloud LoadBalancer. The same question is for GKE Gateway API.
I have tried to look at several pieces of documentation online and it is very contradicting.
There is no additional cost running the Ingress controller with GCP however you have to pay for the HTTP LoadBalancer that Ingress controller create.
It will be the same for all ingress controllers you use GCP, Nginx, Apache.
While Gateway also it's the same, it's controller only provides more flexibility however with Gateway if you are leveraging Managed SSL Certificates, etc then you might have to pay for those services.
Incase if you would like to read more about Ingress vs Gateway checkout my article : https://medium.com/google-cloud/kubernetes-ingress-vs-gateway-api-647ee233693d