contact@nubestack.com LinkedIn

Preparing for Ingress NGINX Retirement

Ingress NGINX is being retired by March 2026. Learn why, what challenges led to its deprecation, recommended alternatives such as the Gateway API, and how NuBeStack helps organisations migrate safely and securely.

Preparing for Ingress NGINX Retirement

The Kubernetes project has announced the retirement of Ingress NGINX, with full end-of-life scheduled for March 2026.
For many organisations, this marks one of the most significant networking shifts in recent years—impacting routing, TLS, automation, and cluster security.

As a cloud engineering and platform services provider, NuBeStack helps businesses modernise their infrastructure. This transition is an opportunity to move toward a more secure, extensible, and future-proof networking model.

Why Ingress NGINX Is Being Retired

Ingress NGINX has been one of the most widely adopted ingress controllers in Kubernetes. But several long-standing challenges ultimately led to its retirement.

1. Maintenance Burden and Growing Technical Debt

Over time, Ingress NGINX accumulated:

  • Hundreds of annotation-driven features
  • Deep integrations with NGINX configuration snippets
  • A large backlog of issues and pull requests

This flexibility came at a cost: very few maintainers were left supporting an extremely complex codebase, making long-term sustainability impossible.

2. Security Concerns and CVEs

In 2025, the admission controller was affected by CVE-2025-1974, a high-severity vulnerability that exposed clusters to potential remote code execution.
With limited maintainer bandwidth, providing timely patches became increasingly difficult.

Continuing to rely on Ingress NGINX introduces growing long-term security risks, especially for production workloads and regulated environments.

3. Kubernetes Is Moving Toward Gateway API

Kubernetes networking has evolved significantly. The Gateway API now offers:

  • Strong separation of responsibilities
  • Rich routing features (headers, weights, mTLS, TCP/UDP)
  • Better extensibility and portability
  • A more standardised model across vendors

Ingress was never designed for the full range of modern L7 routing requirements—Gateway API is the future.

What Are Your Options?

✔️ 1. Adopt the Gateway API (Recommended)

Gateway API is now the Kubernetes-endorsed path forward, offering:

  • Cleaner, role-oriented resource model
  • Support for advanced routing
  • Broad controller ecosystem
  • Sustainable long-term governance

Most major networking vendors now prioritise Gateway API support.

✔️ 2. Switch to Another Ingress Controller

If organisations prefer to stay with the Ingress pattern, alternatives include:

  • HAProxy Ingress Controller
  • Traefik
  • NGINX OSS/Plus Ingress Controller

These remain viable but do not offer the durability and extensibility of Gateway API.

Challenges with Legacy Ingress NGINX Deployments

Many organisations will face migration challenges including:

  • Large numbers of annotation-heavy ingress objects
  • TLS termination and certificate management changes
  • Complex rewrite rules embedded in annotations
  • Dependence on NGINX-specific behaviours
  • CI/CD pipelines tightly integrated with existing ingress definitions

This makes a planned, validated, and reversible migration essential.

How NuBeStack Helps You Transition Smoothly

NuBeStack provides end-to-end assistance for organisations retiring Ingress NGINX and adopting modern Kubernetes networking.

1. Architecture Analysis

We review your existing setup, including:

  • Ingress rules and annotations
  • Application routing patterns
  • Custom NGINX configurations
  • External load balancer and DNS dependencies
  • Multi-environment deployments

You receive a migration roadmap and risk assessment.

2. Gateway API Design

NuBeStack engineers design a production-ready Gateway API configuration:

  • GatewayClass and Gateway resources
  • HTTPRoute, TCPRoute, TLSRoute implementations
  • mTLS and advanced routing policies
  • Helm, Kustomize, and Terraform automation

We also provide NuBeStack Gateway API templates to accelerate rollout.

3. Zero-Downtime Migration

We enable safe migration with:

  • Side-by-side Ingress + Gateway API deployment
  • Gradual traffic shifting
  • Header-based canaries
  • Certificate re-provisioning
  • Full rollback capabilities

Your production traffic stays uninterrupted.

4. Enhanced Security and Observability

Gateway API unlocks stronger security controls.
NuBeStack implements:

  • mTLS
  • Rate limiting
  • L7 traffic policies
  • Isolation between teams and namespaces
  • Policy-driven routing
  • Integrated observability dashboards

This provides stronger security than legacy Ingress setups.

5. Ongoing Management

For customers using NuBeStack’s managed cloud services:

  • We keep your gateway controllers fully supported
  • Provide incident handling
  • Maintain compatibility with Kubernetes upgrades
  • Continuously monitor routing and certificate health

You no longer need to worry about deprecated networking components.

Benefits for Your Organisation

  • Future-proof networking stack aligned with Kubernetes direction
  • Improved reliability and security
  • Better separation of duties between platform and app teams
  • More flexible and feature-rich routing
  • Safer upgrades and CI/CD workflows
  • Lower long-term operational risk

Conclusion

The retirement of Ingress NGINX marks the beginning of a new era in Kubernetes networking.
The Gateway API offers a more robust, secure, and sustainable foundation—and now is the perfect time to modernise.

NuBeStack ensures your migration is safe, efficient, and future-proof, whether you’re using Kubernetes in the cloud or on-prem.

If you’re ready to transition away from Ingress NGINX, NuBeStack can help you start in as little as 48 hours.

Contact us today to begin your Gateway API migration journey.

Related Articles