During last November’s Kubecon + CloudNativeCon North America in Atlanta there was an announcement regarding the retirement of ingress-nginx.

CNCF's platform is a leading organization driving cloud-native technologies and standards, offering insights into container orchestration, microservices architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure. Through whitepapers, case studies, and community events, CNCF provides insights into adopting cloud-native practices and technologies. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about Kubernetes, Prometheus, and other CNCF projects to build and operate scalable and resilient cloud-native applications.

CNCF

Following the announcement of ingress-nginx retirement at KubeCon NA 2024, CERN and Boeing share their migration experiences and lessons learned. CERN, with ~60% of deployments still on ingress-nginx, recommends moving to the Kubernetes Gateway API (enabled via Cilium CNI) as the primary path, with Traefik as a fallback for deployments not yet ready for Gateway API. Boeing is leveraging Istio Service Mesh for complex environments and using CNCF maturity frameworks to guide tool selection across public cloud, on-premise, air-gapped, and customer-deliverable clusters. A large unnamed tech company is evaluating Traefik and Envoy Gateway as replacements. Key lessons include documenting annotation-based lock-in, carefully tracking sub-project maturity within graduated CNCF projects, and reserving capacity to handle unexpected deprecations.

Ingress NGINX retirement: Experience from end users