Why Ingress NGINX Is Being Retired and How to Migrate to Gateway API

About Ingress NGINX

Ingress is the earliest and most user‑friendly way to manage network traffic in Kubernetes, requiring an ingress controller to operate. Ingress NGINX was the original example controller, prized for its flexibility, rich feature set, and independence from any specific cloud or infrastructure.

History and Challenges

The controller’s extensive flexibility made maintenance difficult; features like the "snippets" annotation that allowed arbitrary NGINX configuration are now considered serious security risks. Over time, the project suffered from a lack of maintainers, with only one or two contributors working on it part‑time. The SIG Network and security response committee announced a phased retirement and attempted to develop a replacement controller, InGate, which also failed to mature.

Current Status and Future Plan

Ingress NGINX will continue limited maintenance until March 2026, after which no new releases, bug fixes, or security patches will be provided and the GitHub repository will become read‑only. Existing deployments remain functional, and Helm charts and container images will stay available.

Cluster administrators can verify whether they are using Ingress NGINX with the following command:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx

The SIG Network and security response committee strongly recommend that all users begin migrating immediately, preferably to the modern Gateway API or to other supported ingress controllers listed in the Kubernetes documentation.

References

https://github.com/kubernetes-retired/

https://gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/guides/

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress-controllers/