Community ingress-nginx is retired. What are your ingress controller options now?

Thursday, June 18, 2026

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

Ingress NGINX, the Kubernetes community controller that uses NGINX Open Source as its reverse proxy, has been one of the most widely deployed ways to get traffic into a cluster. In November 2025, Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee announced its retirement, citing the security debt of configuration "snippets" and a maintainership gap. Maintenance ended in March 2026. There are no more releases, bug fixes, or security patches planned.

We'll cover the path the Kubernetes project itself recommends, Gateway API plus the ingress2gateway migration tool, alongside controller alternatives like Traefik, Emissary-ingress, Envoy Gateway, and others. We'll be honest about the tradeoffs of each, including the annotation-mapping work that makes these migrations painful, and what each choice means for observability and traffic routing alongside your service mesh.

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What you'll get out of this

An accurate map of your post-Ingress-NGINX options, Gateway API and controllers both
The annotation-migration realities, so the move doesn't page you later
A framework for evaluating options against your own environment

Getting Ready

This is a hands-on workshop, so it's important that you arrive prepared with a Kubernetes cluster (pretty much any kind will do!) and the Linkerd CLIs installed on your machine! We'll use Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd version 2.18, but Linkerd edge releases starting with edge-25.4.4 will work just fine, too. Check out the BEL Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to set that up. (As always, if you don’t want to do the hands-on portion, you are welcome to just listen in. But it won’t be as fun!)

A quick note on names, because there are three:

NGINX is the reverse proxy, owned by F5, and it's alive and well.
Ingress NGINX (kubernetes/ingress-nginx) is the community controller that just retired.
F5 NGINX Ingress Controller (nginxinc/kubernetes-ingress) is a separate, F5-maintained controller that continues in open source and commercial editions.

This session is about replacing the middle one.

Speakers

Ivan Porta

Customer Success Engineer

Ivan Porta is a Customer Success Engineer at Buoyant with a global perspective shaped by his experience working across Italy, the UK, Australia, and South Korea. Driven by a lifelong passion for technology and backed by advanced certifications from institutions like Stanford and MIT, Ivan has spent his career solving complex problems for high-profile clients such as Microsoft and Barclays. Beyond his day job, he is a dedicated contributor to the dev community—sharing his expertise through keynote speeches, live workshops, and technical writing on everything from Azure to DevOps best practices.