Ingress-NGINX Is Retired: Migrate to Gateway API

On March 24, 2026 the Kubernetes community-maintained ingress-nginx controller officially reached end of life. There are no more releases, no bug fixes, and — the part that matters most for production — no more CVE patches. Because ingress-nginx sits directly in your layer-7 data path, running an unpatched copy is exactly the kind of finding that trips SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and HIPAA audits. Some teams are already seeing deploys blocked by policy.

The official recommendation from SIG Network is to move to the Gateway API, the modern successor to Ingress. To make that move tractable, on March 20, 2026 the project shipped ingress2gateway 1.0, a stable conversion tool that understands 30+ ingress-nginx annotations and emits Gateway API resources that are forward-compatible with Gateway API v1.4. This guide walks the full migration: inventory, controller choice, automated conversion, a safe parallel cutover, and the gotchas that bite people in the annotations that don't translate cleanly.