Ingress NGINX

Ingress NGINX is the Kubernetes ingress controller that 40% of clusters run — and it's being retired in March 2026. If you're still using it, this is your signal to plan migration. The community version is sunsetting, and no more security patches are coming.

Traefik is the easiest migration path — it supports most NGINX annotations natively and auto-discovers services. Kong is better if your traffic is API-heavy and needs rate limiting, JWT validation, and plugin architecture. The F5 NGINX Ingress Controller (commercial) is the smoothest transition if you want to stay in the NGINX world. All of them are converging on the Gateway API standard.

The catch: migration is never just swapping a Helm chart. Your custom annotations, rate-limit configs, and SSL termination quirks will need manual translation. If you're running Ingress NGINX today and it's stable, you have time — but not infinite time. Start evaluating Traefik or Gateway API now before the CVEs pile up with no patches.