Calico Ingress Gateway: Key FAQs Before Migrating from NGINX Ingress Controller
What Platform Teams Need to Know Before Moving to Gateway API
We recently sat down with representatives from 42 companies to discuss a pivotal moment in Kubernetes networking: the NGINX Ingress retirement.
With the March 2026 retirement of the NGINX Ingress Controller fast approaching, platform teams are now facing a hard deadline to modernize their ingress strategy. This urgency was reflected in our recent workshop, “Switching from NGINX Ingress Controller to Calico Ingress Gateway” which saw an overwhelming turnout, with engineers representing a cross-section of the industry, from financial services to high-growth tech startups.
During the session, the Tigera team highlighted a hard truth for platform teams: the original Ingress API was designed for a simpler era. Today, teams are struggling to manage production traffic through “annotation sprawl”—a web of brittle, implementation-specific hacks that make multi-tenancy and consistent security an operational nightmare.
The move to the Kubernetes Gateway API isn’t just a mandatory update; it’s a graduation to a role-oriented, expressive networking model. We’ve previously explored this shift in our blogs on Understanding the NGINX Retirement and Why the Ingress NGINX Controller is Dead.
