Migrate Away from `ingress-nginx`

[artntek]

Ingress NGINX is being retired (see blog post announcement).

• Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026.
• Afterward, there will be no further releases, no bugfixes, and no updates to resolve any security vulnerabilities that may be discovered.
• Existing deployments of Ingress NGINX will continue to function and installation artifacts will remain available.

We need to:

• Find a suitable alternative
• Verify there's a migration path for all our use-cases (e.g. support for existing NGINX annotations)
• Migrate dev K8s
• Migrate prod K8s

[artntek]

Alternative Options - Useful Links

Ingress

Traefik

• Good blog post on Making Traefik NGINX Compatible
• Supported NGINX Annotations

NGINX Ingress Controller (community license)

• Ingress provided by F5, the company behind NGINX.
• (Usually referred to as nginx-ingress, in contrast to the community version we've been using, which is referred to as ingress-nginx)
• Installation with Helm
• Good blog posts comparing with ingres-nginx and how to migrate:
  • https://blog.nginx.org/blog/migrating-ingress-controllers-part-one
  • https://blog.nginx.org/blog/migrating-ingress-controllers-part-2
• Help docs on migrating from Ingress-NGINX Controller to NGINX Ingress Controller

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Gateway API

Gateway API is an official Kubernetes project focused on L4 and L7 routing in Kubernetes. This project represents the next generation of Kubernetes Ingress, Load Balancing, and Service Mesh APIs.

Note

This seems like the future-proof way to go; however, we need to investigate whether all our use-cases are fully supported, since Gateway API is in relatiovely early development

• Migrating from Ingress
• Ingress2gateway helps translate Ingress and provider-specific resources (CRDs) to Gateway API resources.
• NGINX Gateway Fabric is an open-source project that provides an implementation of the Gateway API using NGINX as the data plane. The goal of this project is to implement the core Gateway API to configure an HTTP or TCP/UDP load balancer, reverse-proxy, or API gateway for applications running on Kubernetes. You can find the comprehensive NGINX Gateway Fabric user documentation on the NGINX Documentation website.
• For cert-manager setup, see this tutorial.
  • Note that by design, routes and TLS certs are configured at the Gateway level (ie it's an admin function, instead of allowing all devs to create their own external routes, as Ingress does). Discussed in this Reddit grumble.