Securing Kubernetes Traffic with Calico Ingress Gateway
If you’ve managed traffic in Kubernetes, you’ve likely navigated the world of Ingress controllers. For years, Ingress has been the standard way of getting our HTTP/S services exposed. But let’s be honest, it often felt like a compromise. We wrestled with controller-specific annotations to unlock critical features, blurred the lines between infrastructure and application concerns, and sometimes wished for richer protocol support or a more standardized approach. This “pile of vendor annotations,” while functional, highlighted the limitations of a standard that struggled to keep pace with the complex demands of modern, multi-team environments. The Ingress model was stretched well beyond what it was originally designed for, and over time that led to portability issues, inconsistent behaviour, and real security vulnerabilities.
Ingress NGINX Retirement: Why This Matters Now
The Kubernetes Security Response Committee recently announced the retirement of Ingress NGINX, with support ending in March 2026. This decision reinforces the exact challenges the community has been raising for years. The same flexibility that made it popular early on, especially features like snippet-based configuration, became a major source of technical debt, vendor lockin and security exposure.
After the retirement date, Ingress NGINX will no longer receive security updates or bug fixes. Running Continue reading

