With the official retirement of Ingress NGINX that took place in March 2026, enterprise platform teams are facing an urgent security and compliance mandate.

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With Ingress NGINX officially retired in March 2026, platform teams need a replacement. This post covers how an infrastructure engineer migrated 60+ Kubernetes Ingress resources to Higress, an Envoy/Istio-based AI-native API gateway from Alibaba, in under 30 minutes using an AI agent. The workflow involved auditing existing resources with a specialized migration skill, simulating the new environment using Kind, and generating WASM plugins to replicate custom NGINX logic. Higress offers token-based LLM rate limiting, prompt caching, xDS-based zero-downtime reloads, and MCP server hosting as key differentiators over legacy controllers.

From Ingress NGINX to Higress: migrating 60+ resources in 30 minutes with AI

The solution: Why Higress for the AI era?