If You’re Still Running Ingress NGINX on Your Kubernetes Clusters, This Is Your Wake-Up Call NGINX to Gateway API — A Battle-Tested Migration Guide for AWS EKS In March 2026, the Kubernetes …

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The ingress-nginx controller was officially retired in March 2026, meaning no more security patches or bug fixes. This is a battle-tested migration guide for moving from Ingress NGINX to Kubernetes Gateway API with the AWS Load Balancer Controller on EKS. Key benefits include eliminating the NGINX proxy hop (ALB routes directly to pod IPs), removing the single-pod OOM failure risk, cleaner team ownership via Gateway/HTTPRoute separation, and cost savings from consolidating to one ALB. The guide covers exact version pinning (Gateway API CRDs v1.3.0, LBC Helm chart 1.17.1), IAM/IRSA setup, installing both CRD sets, enabling the ALBGatewayAPI feature gate, and configuring GatewayClass, Gateway, and HTTPRoute resources. Critical gotchas documented include using the wrong controllerName (gateway.k8s.aws/alb not eks.amazonaws.com/alb), missing LBC-specific CRDs, the feature gate not propagating through Helm, and using NodePort instead of IP target type in production.