As announced November 2025, Kubernetes will retire Ingress-NGINX in March 2026. Despite its widespread usage, Ingress-NGINX is full of surprising defaults and side effects that are probably present in your cluster today. This blog highlights these behaviors so that you can migrate away safely and make a conscious decision about which behaviors to keep. This post also compares Ingress-NGINX with Gateway API and shows you how to preserve Ingress-NGINX behavior in Gateway API.

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Ingress-NGINX is being retired by Kubernetes in March 2026. Before migrating to Gateway API, there are five non-obvious behaviors to understand: (1) regex path matches are prefix-based and case-insensitive by default; (2) the use-regex annotation applies to all paths for a given host across all Ingresses, not just the annotated one; (3) the rewrite-target annotation silently enables regex mode for all paths on that host; (4) requests missing a trailing slash are automatically redirected with a 301 to the path with a trailing slash; (5) Ingress-NGINX normalizes URLs (handling dot segments and duplicate slashes) before matching. Each behavior is demonstrated with examples and corresponding Gateway API equivalents are provided to help preserve or consciously change these behaviors during migration.

Before You Migrate: Five Surprising Ingress-NGINX Behaviors You Need to Know

1. Regex matches are prefix-based and case insensitive

2. The nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex applies to all paths of a host across all (Ingress-NGINX) Ingresses

4. Requests missing a trailing slash are redirected to the same path with a trailing slash