Ingress-Nginx Retirement: Migration Guidance for Kubernetes Platform Teams

The Migration Challenge

The retirement announcement for Ingress-Nginx has created an urgent but manageable challenge for platform teams worldwide.

With best-effort maintenance ending in March 2026, teams running production workloads behind Ingress-Nginx controllers must plan and execute a migration within the next 6 months. This timeline represents a necessary but disruptive change that requires careful planning to avoid breaking existing applications whilst maintaining security posture.

Ingress-Nginx powers countless production environments, from startup clusters to enterprise multi-region deployments, so the scale of this migration cannot be understated. Teams face the challenge of replacing not just the controller itself, but ensuring that critical features continue to function seamlessly.

Once Ingress-Nginx reaches end-of-life in March 2026, any newly discovered vulnerabilities will remain unpatched. For internet-facing workloads, this represents an unacceptable risk profile.

The combination of complex attack surfaces and the potential “big bang” of large numbers of organisations unprotected after this date makes this an attractive target for security researchers and threat actors alike.

The absence of a single, universally-accepted replacement means that organisations must now evaluate options against their specific requirements and existing configurations, and will now be facing the challenge of looking at actively maintained alternatives which provide better long-term security outcomes whilst reducing operational overhead.

Gateway API: Forward-Looking Migration Path

The landscape of ingress controller alternatives has matured significantly since Ingress-Nginx first gained popularity. Modern controllers often provide better performance characteristics, more intuitive configuration models, and stronger security defaults, but the challenge lies in finding controllers that support specific Ingress-Nginx features which your applications currently depend upon.

For those teams whom are comfortable with some architectural modernisation and willing to invest in that transition now, the Gateway API framework represents the most forward-looking migration path.

The Gateway API specification was written especially to address many of the configuration limitations that made Ingress-Nginx annotations necessary in the first place. Controllers which support Gateway API (such as Istio Gateway or Envoy Gateway) provide more structured approaches to traffic management whilst maintaining compatibility with existing service meshes and observability tooling.

Traffic policies become more explicit and less reliant on controller-specific annotations. Certificate management integrates more naturally with tools like cert-manager. The separation of infrastructure concerns (Gateway) from application routing (HTTPRoute) creates clearer operational boundaries between platform and application teams.

However, Gateway API introduces significant complexity that may not be justified for all use-cases. Teams must learn multiple new resource types including:

• GatewayClass
• Gateway
• HTTPRoute
• Protocol-specific routes like TCPRoute and UDPRoute

This represents a substantial learning curve compared to familiar Ingress resource patterns. The operational overhead extends beyond initial configuration to include monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining these additional resources throughout their lifecycle.

For many teams, Gateway API may represent unnecessary complexity. Organisations with straightforward routing requirements, limited platform engineering resources, or tight migration timelines might find the investment in Gateway API adoption difficult to justify. Multi-tenant clusters present particular challenges, as the Gateway API’s role-based separation can complicate tenant isolation and increase operational overhead when multiple teams require independent routing configurations.

The role-based separation that Gateway API provides offers little value for single-team applications or environments where application teams directly manage their own routing configuration. In multi-tenant scenarios, managing multiple Gateway resources across different teams whilst maintaining proper isolation and access controls can become significantly more complex than traditional Ingress patterns.

Even for suitable use-cases, Gateway API adoption requires careful consideration of organisational readiness:

• Application teams must understand these new resource types and configuration patterns
• Platform teams will need to quickly establish new operational procedures for Gateway lifecycle management

Both of these can be tricky to cement, even at the best of times. For teams operating under tight timelines or with limited change management bandwidth, this transition might represent too much scope expansion for a single migration project.

Direct Ingress Controller Migration Paths

For use-cases where Gateway API isn’t the answer, HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller provides perhaps the most direct migration path for teams requiring minimal disruption.

The controller provides equivalent functionality to Ingress-Nginx features through its own annotation system. Rate limiting, SSL termination, and URL rewriting capabilities map closely to existing Ingress-Nginx patterns. The HAProxy backend provides proven performance characteristics and extensive configuration flexibility without requiring application teams to learn new paradigms. This includes raw configuration snippets for frontend and backend sections, custom routing with ACL expressions, Map file patterns for complex traffic decisions, and secondary configuration files for accessing advanced HAProxy features not available through standard annotations.

Traefik presents a more targeted migration option with the introduction of its experimental Nginx Ingress Provider in version 3.5. This provider specifically addresses the Ingress-Nginx retirement by supporting about 80% of the most commonly used annotations, which allows the majority of existing Nginx Ingress resources to be used without modification.

This means teams can potentially replace the Ingress-Nginx controller with Traefik whilst leaving Ingress resource definitions unchanged, providing an immediate migration path without requiring annotation translation or configuration rewriting.

However, this compatibility comes with important limitations. Some behaviors that are globally configurable in Nginx (such as default SSL redirect, rate limiting, or affinity) are currently not supported and cannot be overridden on a per-ingress basis as in Nginx.

The Nginx provider represents an experimental bridge rather than complete feature parity. It provides a practical migration foundation that covers the most common use cases, so teams should evaluate whether their specific Ingress-Nginx usage patterns fall within the supported 80% before committing to this migration path.

Alternative Controller Landscape

Beyond HAProxy and Traefik, the Kubernetes ingress ecosystem includes several other mature alternatives worth considering.

Cloud-provider managed controllers such as AWS Load Balancer Controller, Google Cloud Load Balancer Controller, and Azure Application Gateway Ingress Controller offer compelling options for teams already committed to specific cloud platforms. These controllers may be chosen as they provide deep integration with cloud-native load balancing services, and may deliver superior performance characteristics. However, they create vendor lock-in and may not suit multi-cloud or hybrid deployment strategies.

Enterprise-grade alternatives such as Kong Kubernetes Ingress Controller and Emissary Ingress provide extensive feature sets including advanced authentication, rate limiting, and API gateway functionality. These controllers are best suited in environments requiring sophisticated traffic management policies or for organisations already running Kong or Ambassador infrastructure, but introduce additional complexity and licensing considerations that may not align with straightforward migration requirements.

There are of course controllers like Istio Ingress Gateway and Linkerd which integrate naturally with service mesh deployments, providing consistent policy enforcement across ingress and east-west traffic. These options are primarily relevant for platforms that have already adopted these service mesh technologies.

Critical Feature Compatibility Analysis

The success of any Ingress-Nginx migration depends heavily on maintaining compatibility with features that applications currently depend upon. Five areas require particular attention:

• Custom annotations
• Rate limiting
• SSL termination
• URL manipulation
• Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Custom annotations: These represent the most complex compatibility challenge. Ingress-Nginx supports extensive annotations for CORS configuration, backend protocol selection, and more. Alternative controllers implement similar functionality through different annotation names or configuration approaches.

Before selecting alternatives, teams must inventory their current annotation usage. We recommend starting with a comprehensive kubectl get ingress -A -o json | jq -r '.items[] | [.metadata.namespace, .metadata.name, (.metadata.annotations | del(."kubectl.kubernetes.io/last-applied-configuration") | to_entries[] | "\(.key)=\(.value)")] | flatten | @tsv' one-liner query to extract all annotations from existing Ingress resources, then categorising them by functionality to understand migration complexity.

Rate limiting: Configurations can vary significantly between controllers. Ingress-Nginx uses annotations like nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rate-limit-connections, whilst HAProxy Ingress uses different syntax. Gateway API controllers implement rate limiting through separate policy resources.

Different controllers may implement rate limiting algorithms differently, potentially affecting application behaviour under load. Teams should validate rate limiting effectiveness in staging environments, particularly for applications that depend on precise rate limiting behaviour for security purposes.

SSL termination: Modern controllers often provide better cert-manager integration and certificate management than Ingress-Nginx, but may have different default cipher suites, protocol support, or certificate chain handling.

Teams using advanced TLS features like client certificate authentication should validate these configurations carefully during migration.

URL manipulation: Capabilities can vary considerably between alternatives for both this and path manipulation. Ingress-Nginx provides extensive URL manipulation through annotations like nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target and nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex.

Alternative controllers can implement similar functionality through different configuration approaches, with Gateway API providing URL rewriting through HTTPRoute filters. As these features may require the most extensive testing during migration, teams should identify at the earliest opportunity applications which depend on complex path rewriting or regular expression matching.

Web Application Firewall (WAF): Many production deployments and platforms rely on Ingress-Nginx’s ModSecurity integration for application-layer security protection.

Alternative controllers implement WAF functionality differently. HAProxy Ingress Controller provides direct ModSecurity integration with Core Rule Set support, whilst Traefik offers WAF through plugins and middleware. Gateway API controllers often integrate with external WAF solutions rather than embedded rule engines.

Teams using ModSecurity rulesets should inventory current configurations and validate rule effectiveness with alternative controllers. Custom rules may require translation to different WAF engines or migration to external security solutions. For internet-facing applications, maintaining equivalent security posture during migration becomes critical to avoid exposing applications during the transition period.

Migration Strategy and Risk Mitigation

Successful Ingress-Nginx migration requires a systematic approach that minimises risk whilst maintaining operational velocity.

Many teams may have already developed these capabilities through applying changes that were eventually necessity in addressing Ingress-nginx CVE-2025-1974 earlier in 2025.

However, the permanent controller migration presents additional complexity: replacing entire controller infrastructure, potentially moving load balancers to forward to different ports, and updating ingress listeners on cluster node ports, challenges beyond the patch-and-restart approach used for CVE remediation.

The staged migration approach has proven most effective for complex environments, whether addressing security vulnerabilities or permanent controller transitions. Rather than migrating all applications or all clusters simultaneously, teams can validate the new controller with low-risk workloads or clusters before expanding to critical services. Platform management systems that can target and cherry-pick deployments across subsets of clusters provide significant risk mitigation in this scenario.

Running the new controller in parallel with Ingress-Nginx can also reduce cutover risk for critical applications. This will require the new controller to listen on different ports than Ingress-Nginx, but this should be the only overlap to consider.

If implementing a controller that still uses Ingress, different ingress classes can be used to control which controller handles routes for specific applications. This allows gradual traffic shifting whilst maintaining quick revert capabilities if issues arise. However, this requires careful planning of cluster resource allocation and DNS management to avoid conflicts.

For controllers which follow Gateway API implementation (or their own bespoke implementation, like Istio Ingress), these routes can be maintained independently.

Comprehensive testing protocols become essential for validating consistent application behaviour after migration. Basic connectivity testing proves insufficient for complex applications. Teams should develop automated testing suites that validate application functionality against both old and new controllers, covering normal operations and failure conditions like certificate expiration and traffic spike handling. Care should also be taken to test that any config changes applied are idempotent, and the result is the same before and after a controller is restarted.

Teams that developed robust testing procedures for the CVE-2025-1974 response can adapt these approaches for permanent migration validation.

Timeline Considerations and Political Realities

Teams should begin migration planning immediately rather than waiting until early 2025.

The March 2026 deadline creates manageable timeline pressure that requires balancing technical implementation speed with organisational change management needs. While technical controller migration may be straightforward, liaising across application teams to coordinate changes often requires significantly more time than anticipated.

Technical implementation typically represents the smaller portion of migration effort. Deploying a new controller and updating configurations can be completed within days or weeks. However, validating application functionality, working with application teams to push these changes through, and working within production change cadences (which may limit deployments to monthly or quarterly windows) may require months.

Additionally, application teams need time to understand new configuration patterns and test thoroughly, and platform teams must develop new operational procedures and update monitoring systems.

Early planning provides time for addressing unexpected complications and enables staged deployment rather than forced big-bang transitions. However, running end-of-life Ingress-Nginx after March 2026 represents an unacceptable security risk. Teams unable to complete migration by the deadline should develop interim risk mitigation strategies like WAF deployment whilst accelerating their migration timeline.

Building Your Migration Plan

Developing an effective migration plan requires understanding your current Ingress-Nginx usage patterns, evaluating alternatives against specific requirements, and creating a systematic approach to testing and deployment:

• Start with a comprehensive audit of your current deployment:
  • Identify all Ingress resources, annotations and custom configurations, and understand which applications depend on specific controller behaviours
  • The audit should include operational considerations like monitoring systems, incident response procedures, and certificate management processes
• Select your target controller based on compatibility requirements and organisational constraints:
  • Teams with complex annotation usage or tight timelines may prefer controllers providing direct Ingress-Nginx compatibility
  • Teams with flexibility might choose Gateway API controllers offering long-term architectural benefits
• Develop a staged testing and deployment plan that validates controller functionality whilst minimising production risk
  • Begin with non-critical applications, validate essential features and performance, then gradually expand to critical workloads
  • Include contingency procedures for unexpected issues and maintain rollback capabilities during transition

Frequently Asked Questions

Need Help with Your Ingress-Nginx Migration?

Migrating from Ingress-Nginx whilst maintaining production stability requires careful planning and deep understanding of both your current configuration and target alternatives.

At LiveWyer, we have guided numerous organisations through complex Kubernetes infrastructure transitions, helping them evaluate options, plan migration strategies, and execute changes without service disruption.

Contact us to learn how we can help you navigate the Ingress-Nginx retirement whilst strengthening your infrastructure for the future.