The End of an Era for Ingress Nginx

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has officially announced the retirement of the Ingress Nginx Controller for Kubernetes. The deadline is set for March 2026. After this date, the software will no longer receive support, security updates, or bug fixes, meaning any continued use will be at the user’s own risk.

Why the Change?

The decision is driven by several critical factors:

  • Sustainable Maintenance: Challenges in finding maintainers for the existing code base.
  • Security Risks: The current ability to add arbitrary configuration directives (snippets) poses a security issue that is difficult to resolve.
  • Technological Evolution: The CNCF is positioning the Gateway API as the future-proof standard, offering a more robust architecture and better separation of concerns between operations and development teams.

Alternatives and Next Steps

Users are strongly advised to plan their migration to the Gateway API. While switching architectures (from a central controller to an operator model) can be complex, tools exist to ease the transition. For example, HAProxy’s Unified Gateway allows Ingress rules and Gateway API to run side-by-side. Other supported platforms include Envoy, Istio, Cilium, and Nginx Gateway Fabric.

Source: The New Stack