Kubernetes Announces the End of Ingress NGINX

Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee have announced the official end for Ingress NGINX. The component, which for years was among the most used ingress controllers in the Kubernetes ecosystem, will only receive best-effort maintenance until March 2026. After that, no releases, no bugfixes, and no security updates will be provided. Existing installations will continue to work, and all artifacts will remain available – however, without any guarantee for future security or stability.

Background

Ingress NGINX emerged early in the history of Kubernetes as a flexible and cloud-independent reference implementation. Its wide adoption was based on its variety of functions and easy integration into a wide variety of environments. Over the years, however, numerous other ingress controllers emerged, both within the project and through external providers.

In parallel, the complexity of Ingress NGINX grew. Functions that were once considered flexible – such as freely definable NGINX configuration fragments (“snippets”) – are today increasingly assessed as security risks. At the same time, the circle of maintainers remained small. For a long time, one or two people handled the development in their free time. This structural bottleneck could never be resolved despite multiple appeals.

Reasons for Discontinuation

The project maintainers announced already last year to progressively scale back Ingress NGINX and to develop a successor together with the Gateway API community. Nevertheless, it was not possible to gain additional support. The planned replacement “InGate” also did not progress beyond early stages of development and is also being discontinued.

SIG Network and the Security Response Committee are now drawing the consequences: without sufficient resources for long-term and secure further development, the project must be ended in an orderly manner.

Recommended Next Steps

Organizations that continue to rely on Ingress should migrate to alternatives early. Kubernetes particularly recommends the Gateway API as a modern and long-term supported architecture. Additionally, numerous other ingress controllers are available in the official documentation.

Administrators can check if Ingress NGINX is active in the cluster by running the following query:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx

Outlook

Ingress NGINX has processed billions of requests worldwide for years and contributed decisively to the spread of Kubernetes. The discontinuation of the project marks a deep cut, but is primarily intended to secure one goal: the long-term stability and security of the Kubernetes ecosystem.

The full blog post from Kubernetes can be found at the following link:
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/11/ingress-nginx-retirement/