Nginx is Gone! What Are My Ingress Controller Alternatives?

Thursday, June 18, 2026

9 am PT | 12 pm ET | 6 pm CET

After F5 announced it would end support for the community version of Nginx, one of the most widely deployed Kubernetes ingress controllers, organizations are being forced to rethink their ingress strategy. In this Service Mesh Academy, we'll explore the leading alternatives, including Traefik, Emissary-ingress, and others. We'll break down the pros and cons of each ingress controller, including what each choice means for observability and traffic routing, and we’ll also get a sneak peek at what Buoyant has in the works for those willing to wait a bit longer.

Whether you're migrating away from Nginx today or planning ahead, this session is your practical guide to evaluating, choosing, and deploying an ingress controller that integrates with your service mesh.

What you'll get out of this

A clear comparison of leading Kubernetes ingress controllers
A framework for evaluating ingress options against your own environment
An early look at what's coming from Buoyant

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!)

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.