Is It Time to Migrate? A Practical Look at Kubernetes Ingress vs. Gateway API
If you’ve managed traffic in Kubernetes, you’ve likely worked with Ingress controllers. For years, Ingress has been the standard way to expose HTTP and HTTPS services. But in practice, it often came with trade-offs. Controller-specific annotations were required to unlock critical features, the line between infrastructure and application responsibilities was unclear, and configurations often became tied to the implementation rather than the intent.
Ingress NGINX Retirement Raises the Stakes
Recently, the Kubernetes community announced that Ingress NGINX will be formally retired, with only best-effort maintenance provided until March 2026. After that point, there will be no bug fixes, no security updates, and the project will move to read-only archival status. Any cluster still relying on Ingress NGINX after that date will be running an unsupported controller, which increases maintenance overhead and security risk.
For many organizations, now is the time to treat this as a high-priority project: inventory all clusters using Ingress NGINX, create a migration plan (test, convert, cut over), and avoid ending up in a reactive scramble as the March 2026 deadline approaches.
If the move from Ingress to the Gateway API once felt optional, this new timeline changes the situation. Depending on an aging data-plane component without Continue reading
