Browsing over my list of blogs I usually read, I saw an interesting announcement on Kubernetes blog about retirement of NGINX Ingress Controller. According to the information published at https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/11/ingress-nginx-retirement/ the maintenance will continue only until March 2026.
For an extended period, this Kubernetes ingress controller implementation has been among the most widely adopted solutions, offering extensive customization capabilities. This means that if your cluster was built using some community guide, there is a good chance that it uses exactly this controller.
Although the NGINX Ingress Controller will remain installable after March 2026, I would recommend against it. By design the Ingress Controller stands at entrance gate to you k8s cluster performing critical task such as:
- Exposing k8s services outside of k8s cluster and traffic routing
- Layer-7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancing
- SSL/TSL termination
- External load balancer integration in cloud environments
This puts it on a critical traffic path for any application running on k8s, and its failure results in application downtime. Also being on the edge, it is constantly exposed to outside threats and attacks. Timely resolution of security vulnerabilities is therefore essential for maintaining both system performance and security posture.
To check if your system is affected by this change you can run
kubectl get pods \--all-namespaces \--selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx
with cluster administration privileges.
Suggested upgrade path to migrate to k8s Gateway API or alternative Ingress controller.
At CROZ we have extensive experience in operating k8s clusters in different environments, and we can help with this critical migration. You can reach out to me personally or our team [email protected].
