Community Ingress-Nginx is Retired. What are Your Ingress Controller Options Now?

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.

In this Service Mesh Academy, we 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 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.