The Kubernetes community has entered a major transition point as kubernetes retires ingress nginx, one of the most widely used ingress controllers in the cloud-native ecosystem. The decision, announced at KubeCon NA 2025, marks the beginning of a long farewell: the project will receive only best-effort maintenance until March 2026. After that, no further releases, security fixes or updates will be issued.
For many teams running production clusters, this announcement acts as a wake-up call. Ingress NGINX has been a default choice for years thanks to its flexibility, feature richness and cloud-agnostic design. However, its popularity eventually outpaced the community’s ability to maintain it.
Why kubernetes retires ingress nginx after years of dominance
The core reason behind the retirement is painfully simple: not enough maintainers. Over time, responsibility for the entire controller fell to just one or two developers, many of whom contributed after their day jobs or on weekends. Although the community attempted to attract new maintainers, interest never reached a sustainable level.
Moreover, the controller’s extensive feature set — once seen as a strength — slowly turned into overwhelming technical debt. Support for arbitrary NGINX configuration via snippets annotations, for example, became a serious security risk in modern environments. Consequently, the maintainers concluded that the architectural burden could no longer justify continued development.
How kubernetes retires ingress nginx and ends the InGate project
Alongside this news, the Kubernetes SIG Network confirmed that InGate, an early replacement attempt, will also be retired. Despite initial optimism, the project never gained enough traction to move beyond its early development stage.
As kubernetes retires ingress nginx, the community is now promoting a modern successor: Gateway API. This API was designed from the ground up to address long-standing limitations of Ingress and offer a role-based model that cleanly separates responsibilities between infrastructure providers, cluster operators and application developers.
Why Gateway API is the recommended path forward
Gateway API reached general availability in late 2023, and since then it has steadily matured. Unlike the old Ingress spec, Gateway API supports many features natively:
- HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP and gRPC
- traffic splitting
- header-based routing
- advanced matching rules
- multi-role delegation
Previously, many of these capabilities required vendor-specific annotations in Ingress NGINX. With Gateway API, they are first-class, well-governed and designed for extension.
As a result, the Kubernetes community strongly advises organisations to begin migrating as soon as possible to maintain both reliability and security.
Alternatives for teams that can’t adopt Gateway API yet
Some organisations might be unable to migrate immediately. Fortunately, several actively maintained ingress controllers remain available, many backed by established vendors:
- NGINX (commercial and open-source)
- Kong
- Traefik
- HAProxy
- Other vendor-supported options
These controllers differ in performance, governance and configuration styles, but all of them offer long-term support — something Ingress NGINX will soon lack.
Why the ingress nginx retirement matters for cloud-native infrastructure
Industry voices have already weighed in on the impact of kubernetes retiring ingress nginx. Cloud-native advocate Jimmy Song called it “a pivotal moment in infrastructure evolution,” highlighting that tools without ongoing security updates eventually shift from assets to liabilities.
He notes that while many users viewed Ingress NGINX as a “black box,” migration will reveal a hidden operational wave affecting clusters worldwide. Moreover, the shift toward unified, extensible APIs — such as Gateway API — reflects a broader pattern across modern cloud-native tooling.
What organisations should do next
Networking vendors have already begun positioning themselves around the transition. NGINX promotes its Gateway Fabric as a natural successor. Kong, Traefik and HAProxy have published migration guides, and HAProxy even released a dedicated tool to help teams move off Ingress NGINX smoothly.
To determine whether your cluster is affected, the community recommends running:
kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx
If the controller appears in your environment, migration planning should begin immediately. The sooner organisations transition, the more reliable and secure their clusters will remain.
Why kubernetes retiring ingress nginx marks a turning point
Although the retirement may feel disruptive, the decision reflects a natural progression. Community-driven software thrives when maintainers can sustain long-term momentum — and struggles when workloads outgrow available contributors. By acknowledging this reality, kubernetes retires ingress nginx not as a failure, but as a step toward a more modern, well-governed and future-proof networking model.
For teams across the cloud-native world, this marks the beginning of an important migration journey — and a chance to build stronger, more resilient infrastructure for the years ahead.
Read also
Join the discussion in our Facebook community.