Kubernetes retires Ingress NGINX in March 2026; tool supports 30+ annotations
Ingress NGINX reaches end-of-life after years of maintenance by one or two volunteers, while Ingress2Gateway 1.0 adds support for over 30 annotations to ease migration to Gateway API.
Disclaimer
This article was produced by Scroll Insights News Desk using automated systems and published under our standing editorial policy. It is compiled from the primary sources linked above and is provided for general information only — it is not legal, financial, investment, tax or professional advice, and no decision should be taken on it without independent verification against those sources. Errors can be reported to corrections@scrollinsights.com and are corrected on the record.
Kubernetes will retire Ingress NGINX in March 2026, ending development of the ingress controller that Datadog research shows approximately 50% of cloud native environments currently rely on. After retirement, no releases will be issued for bug fixes, security patches, or updates of any kind.
Ingress NGINX has been maintained solely by one or two people working in their free time for the last several years. The Kubernetes project announced the retirement in November 2025.
Finding and auditing Ingress-NGINX clusters
Operators can identify whether their clusters use Ingress NGINX by running kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx. Ingress-NGINX and NGINX Ingress are two separate ingress controllers; NGINX Ingress is maintained by F5.
How Ingress2Gateway eases migration
Ingress2Gateway 1.0, installable via go install github.com/kubernetes-sigs/ingress2gateway@v1.0.0 or brew install ingress2gateway, now supports over 30 common Ingress-NGINX annotations, up from three in previous versions. Supported annotations include CORS, backend TLS, regex matching, and path rewrite. Ingress2Gateway 1.0 includes comprehensive integration testing with real controllers in live clusters that verify behavioral equivalence.
The tool supports three emitter options—agentgateway, envoy-gateway, and kgateway—for implementation-specific extensions.
Key Ingress-NGINX behaviors to replicate
Operators migrating workloads need to account for specific Ingress-NGINX behaviors. Ingress-NGINX redirects requests missing a trailing slash to the same path with a trailing slash using a 301 Moved Permanently response. Ingress-NGINX normalizes URLs by removing path segments that are just a dot, having .. path segments remove the previous segment, and deduplicating consecutive slashes.
Regex matches in Ingress-NGINX are prefix-based and case insensitive. The nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex annotation applies to all paths of a host across all Ingress-NGINX Ingresses. The nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target annotation silently adds the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex annotation and causes all paths with that host to be treated as regex patterns.
Gateway API maturation supports the transition
Gateway API 1.5, released 27 February 2026, graduated ListenerSet and the HTTPRoute CORS filter features, providing alternatives to Ingress NGINX capabilities as operators plan migrations.