After the ingress-NGINX retirement, what your migration plan owes production

The status of the controller As of March 2026, the Kubernetes SIG Network stopped maintaining ingress-nginx. That is the controller a lot of clusters have been running for years. A CNCF blog post published July 9 walks operators through the state of play. The headline for anyone still on it is short: unpatched CVEs, and no more feature work. The post names two operational risks explicitly. New security issues will not receive upstream fixes. Feature updates and community support have stopped. If your ingress plane is a piece of infrastructure you have not touched in a while, this is the reason to pull it up in this quarter's planning doc. What it means at 3am An ingress controller sits between the internet and your services. When it drops a request, you find out from your users. When it takes a CVE and no one is patching, you find out from a scanner or from a report. Neither is a good discovery path. The controller also carries the exact set of annotations, TLS defaults and rewrite rules your workloads rely on. Nothing about a retirement changes the version you have in production today, so the immediate blast radius is zero. The risk is on the calendar, not on the pager. That is the kind of risk teams reliably defer until a scanner flags an unpatched CVE. The two paths CNCF lays out The post frames the choice as a fork. Path A is a lateral swap to another Ingress controller. The example named is Contour, described in the post as Envoy-based. This keeps you on the Ingress API and mostly moves the problem of who is patching. Path B is modernization to the Gateway API, described in the post as the upstream-backed successor to Ingress. The CNCF post points at ingress2gateway to automate the translation, and recommends an incremental rollout: run the new plane in parallel and move non-critical workloads first. The stopgap version is a mix. Adopt Contour to buy time on maintained code, then schedule the Gateway API move on your own calendar rather than under duress. What