Hi Mutha:

The default backend is a service which handles all the traffic that does not match any of the rules in the ingress resources. This includes all requests that are not mapped to any specific pod. Essentially, it's a catch-all mechanism for requests that can't be routed based on the existing Ingress rules.

For example, any other request (like nonexistent.example.com or myapp.example.com/nonexistentpath) gets routed to the default-backend.