Ingress NGINX Retirement Announcement: Kubecon Atlanta 2025 News

Article-At-A-Glance

• Ingress NGINX will be retired in March 2026 with best-effort maintenance until then and no security updates afterward
• SIG Network and Security Response Committee strongly recommend migrating to Gateway API or alternative ingress controllers immediately
• Existing deployments will continue to function, but will become increasingly vulnerable without security patches
• Gateway API offers significant advantages including more flexible routing, better multi-tenant support, and improved security
• Several migration tools and strategies are available to help teams transition smoothly from Ingress NGINX

The Kubernetes ecosystem is about to undergo a significant change as Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee have jointly announced the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX. This popular ingress controller, which has been a staple for managing external access to services in Kubernetes clusters for years, will no longer receive support after March 2026. Ingress NGINX users should start planning their migration strategy now to ensure their infrastructure remains secure and supported.

This announcement, made at KubeCon Atlanta 2025, marks a pivotal moment for Kubernetes networking as the community officially shifts focus to the Gateway API. While many saw this coming based on the Gateway API’s graduation to GA status in late 2023, the timeline is now concrete, giving teams approximately 16 months to transition their infrastructure.

Ingress Nginx Controller Retiring in 2025: What You Need to Know

The retirement announcement doesn’t mean Ingress NGINX will suddenly stop working. Instead, it signals the end of official maintenance, security patching, and feature development. Installation artifacts will remain available, and existing deployments will continue functioning, but without critical security updates, these deployments will become increasingly vulnerable over time.

For organizations heavily invested in Ingress NGINX, this transition period provides crucial time to assess current deployments, explore alternatives, and implement migration plans without rushing. However, given the security implications, SIG Network strongly recommends beginning migration efforts immediately rather than waiting until the final support date approaches. For a detailed comparison of potential alternatives, consider reading this Istio vs Linkerd service mesh solutions comparison.

“To prioritize the safety and security of the ecosystem, Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee are announcing the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX. Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026. Afterward, there will be no further releases, no bugfixes, and no updates to resolve any security vulnerabilities that may be discovered.”

– Official Kubernetes announcement

Retirement Timeline: Maintenance Until March 2026

From now until March 2026, Ingress NGINX will receive best-effort maintenance. This means critical security vulnerabilities will still be patched, though feature development has effectively ceased. The maintenance team will focus exclusively on stability and security issues during this period, prioritizing the most severe vulnerabilities based on available resources.

During this transition phase, users can expect occasional maintenance releases addressing high-severity security issues, but should not anticipate new features or significant improvements. This approach allows the limited maintainer resources to focus on both supporting existing deployments while also helping facilitate migration to Gateway API or alternative ingress controllers.

Date	Milestone	What It Means
November 2025	Retirement Announcement	Official notice of upcoming retirement
November 2025 – March 2026	Best-effort Maintenance	Critical security fixes only; no new features
March 2026	End of Maintenance	No further releases or security patches

No Security Updates After Retirement Date

Perhaps the most critical aspect of this retirement is the cessation of security updates after March 2026. Given NGINX’s role as a gateway to your Kubernetes services, running an unsupported version exposes your infrastructure to significant risk. Any vulnerabilities discovered after the retirement date will remain unpatched, creating potential entry points for attackers. This security risk alone should motivate organizations to prioritize migration efforts well before the March 2026 deadline.

Migration to Gateway API Recommended

The official recommendation from SIG Network is clear: migrate to the Gateway API. As the successor to the Ingress API, Gateway API represents a more powerful, flexible, and feature-rich approach to Kubernetes service networking. It has already reached GA status and offers significant improvements over the original Ingress resource, including better support for modern traffic routing patterns, improved multi-team environments, and more explicit security configurations.

Why Kubernetes Is Retiring the Ingress Nginx Controller

The decision to retire Ingress NGINX wasn’t made lightly. After years of being the default choice for many Kubernetes deployments, several factors led to this significant change in direction. Understanding these factors can help teams better appreciate the need for migration and embrace the alternatives with confidence.

Technical Debt and Security Concerns

Ingress NGINX has accumulated substantial technical debt over the years. The codebase has grown increasingly complex, making security audits difficult and increasing the risk of undetected vulnerabilities. The March 2025 CVE-2025-1974 incident highlighted these challenges, requiring extensive emergency patching that strained the limited maintenance resources available to the project.

The architecture of Ingress NGINX, while groundbreaking when introduced, wasn’t designed with the security principles that modern cloud-native applications require. Its monolithic nature means that even minor updates require full redeployments, increasing the operational burden on teams and making it difficult to maintain a strong security posture.

Lack of Active Maintainers

One of the primary issues facing Ingress NGINX has been a steady decline in active maintainers. Despite being one of the most widely deployed Kubernetes components, the project has struggled to attract and retain contributors who can dedicate the necessary time to address issues, review pull requests, and implement new features. This shortage has resulted in a growing backlog of unaddressed issues and feature requests.

The maintainer shortage became particularly apparent during security incidents, where response times were slower than desired for such critical infrastructure. This pattern made it clear that the project’s governance model was no longer sustainable for a component so central to Kubernetes security.

Shift Toward Gateway API as the Modern Standard

The Kubernetes ecosystem has been gradually moving toward the Gateway API as the successor to Ingress since its introduction. With Gateway API reaching GA status in late 2023, it has demonstrated the maturity and stability required for production use. This API provides a more expressive, extensible, and powerful way to define how traffic flows into a Kubernetes cluster.

Gateway API was designed with the lessons learned from Ingress in mind, offering better multi-team support, more sophisticated traffic routing capabilities, and improved security by design. Its resource model aligns better with modern microservices architectures and provides clearer separation of concerns between infrastructure providers, cluster operators, and application developers.

InGate Project Failure and Its Impact

The attempted InGate project, which aimed to bridge Ingress NGINX and Gateway API implementations, failed to gain traction in early 2025. This project was intended to serve as a migration path that would allow gradual transition while maintaining compatibility, but technical challenges and resource limitations ultimately led to its abandonment.

This failure further highlighted the need for a clean break and complete migration rather than attempting to maintain backward compatibility indefinitely. The resources that might have gone into the InGate project are now being directed toward improving migration tools and documentation to help teams transition more efficiently.

Your Migration Options: Where to Go From Here

With the retirement of Ingress NGINX approaching, teams need to evaluate their options and select the path that best suits their needs. Fortunately, the Kubernetes ecosystem offers several viable alternatives, each with its own strengths and considerations.

Gateway API Implementation: The Preferred Path

The Gateway API is the recommended destination for most teams currently using Ingress NGINX. This modern API provides significant advantages in terms of functionality, security, and future-proofing your infrastructure. Several implementations of Gateway API are available, including managed offerings from major cloud providers and open-source projects like Contour, Istio, and Emissary-ingress.

For most organizations, the migration to Gateway API represents not just a necessary change but an opportunity to adopt a more powerful and flexible networking layer. The improved expressiveness of Gateway API makes it possible to implement complex routing scenarios that would have required custom annotations or external tools with Ingress NGINX.

Alternative Ingress Controllers

For teams that need to maintain compatibility with the Ingress API for the time being, several alternative controllers are available. These include HAProxy Ingress, Kong Ingress Controller, and Traefik, all of which implement the Ingress API but are maintained independently of the retiring Ingress NGINX project.

While this approach may seem like the path of least resistance in the short term, it’s important to recognize that it still represents a significant migration effort while only delaying the eventual move to Gateway API. These controllers often have different annotation schemas and behavior compared to Ingress NGINX, requiring careful testing and validation during migration.

The Kubernetes documentation maintains a comprehensive list of available Ingress controllers, with information about their features, maintenance status, and compatibility considerations. Teams should evaluate these alternatives based on their specific requirements, including performance needs, feature sets, and support options.

• Kong Ingress Controller: Built on Kong Gateway, offers advanced traffic management capabilities and API gateway features
• HAProxy Ingress: Known for high performance and low resource consumption, good for high-traffic environments
• Traefik: Auto-discovery capabilities and intuitive configuration, with good integration into the broader cloud-native ecosystem
• Contour: Designed to be minimal and focused on HTTP/HTTPS ingress, with a clean migration path to Gateway API
• Nginx Inc.’s commercial offering: A supported version of Nginx ingress with additional enterprise features

Commercial Support Options

For enterprises with mission-critical workloads running on Ingress NGINX, several vendors have announced extended support offerings that will continue beyond the official retirement date. These commercial options can provide a safety net during migration, offering security patches and technical support while teams work toward implementing Gateway API or alternative solutions.

Migration Strategy: Step-by-Step Action Plan

Successful migration from Ingress NGINX requires careful planning and execution. A phased approach minimizes disruption and ensures all aspects of your current configuration are properly translated to the new system. By following a structured migration plan, you can ensure continuity of service while moving to more modern and secure networking options.

The Kubernetes community has developed several tools to assist with this transition, recognizing the widespread use of Ingress NGINX and the importance of making migration as painless as possible. These tools can significantly reduce the manual effort required, especially for large-scale deployments with numerous ingress resources.

1. Audit Your Current Ingress Resources

Begin by creating a comprehensive inventory of your existing Ingress NGINX deployments. Document all custom annotations, configurations, and specific NGINX features you’re currently utilizing. Pay special attention to any customizations that might not have direct equivalents in your target platform. This audit will form the foundation of your migration plan and help identify potential challenges early.

Several open-source tools can assist with this audit, including the newly released ingress-scanner tool that automatically catalogs your Ingress resources and flags configurations that might require special attention during migration. The tool generates detailed reports highlighting custom annotations, complex routing rules, and other aspects that need careful consideration.

2. Select Your Replacement Technology

Based on your audit and organizational requirements, select the appropriate replacement technology. For most organizations, a Gateway API implementation will be the optimal choice, but consider all factors including team expertise, existing infrastructure, and specific feature needs. If you’re operating in a multi-cloud environment, you may want to select a solution that works consistently across different providers.

Evaluate the maturity of various implementations, their community support, and their alignment with your specific use cases. Some implementations may excel at certain scenarios (like microservices architectures or API gateway functionality) while others might offer better performance for high-throughput applications.

3. Create a Testing Environment

Set up a parallel environment where you can test your chosen replacement without affecting production traffic. This environment should mirror your production setup as closely as possible to ensure valid test results. Implement your new ingress solution alongside your existing Ingress NGINX deployment, allowing for side-by-side comparison and validation.

Testing should include not just functional validation but also performance benchmarking, security testing, and operational aspects like monitoring and alerting integration. Pay special attention to how the new solution handles failure scenarios and recovery procedures.

4. Use Available Migration Tools

Take advantage of migration tools that can automate the conversion of your Ingress resources to Gateway API or other formats. The ingress2gateway tool, introduced in late 2023, can automatically convert most standard Ingress resources to equivalent Gateway API configurations. For more complex setups, the newer nginx-gateway-translator can help transform Ingress NGINX-specific annotations to their Gateway API equivalents.

These tools won’t handle every edge case perfectly, so be prepared to manually adjust some configurations, especially for highly customized deployments. Always validate the generated resources against your requirements and test thoroughly before deploying to production.

5. Set Implementation Deadlines

Create a realistic timeline for your migration with clear milestones and deadlines. Working backward from the March 2026 end-of-support date, allocate sufficient time for each phase of your migration. Include buffer periods for unexpected challenges and additional testing as needed. Breaking the migration into smaller, manageable chunks makes the process less overwhelming and reduces risk.

Communicate this timeline clearly to all stakeholders, ensuring everyone understands the importance and urgency of the migration. Regular progress reviews help keep the project on track and provide opportunities to adjust the plan as needed based on lessons learned during early migration phases.

What Happens If You Don’t Migrate?

While migrating from Ingress NGINX requires effort and resources, the consequences of not migrating could be significantly more costly. Understanding these risks can help prioritize migration efforts and secure the necessary resources to complete the transition before support ends.

Short-Term: Continued Functionality

In the immediate aftermath of the March 2026 support end date, your Ingress NGINX deployments will continue to function as before. Existing installations won’t suddenly stop working, and your services will remain accessible. This might create a false sense of security, leading some organizations to delay migration unnecessarily.

However, even in this early period, you’ll notice the absence of updates and new features. As the Kubernetes ecosystem continues to evolve, your networking layer will remain static, potentially limiting your ability to adopt new platform capabilities or patterns.

Long-Term: Growing Security Risks

The most serious consequence of not migrating is the increasing security risk over time. Without security patches and updates, any vulnerabilities discovered after March 2026 will remain unaddressed in your environment. Given that ingress controllers are exposed to external traffic, these vulnerabilities could provide attack vectors into your cluster.

The history of NGINX and similar web servers shows that security vulnerabilities are discovered regularly. Some of these, like the critical CVE-2025-1974 discovered earlier this year, require prompt patching to prevent exploitation. Without an active maintenance team, these vulnerabilities will remain unpatched, leaving your systems exposed.

“Running an unsupported ingress controller is like leaving your front door unlocked in a high-crime neighborhood. It might be convenient in the short term, but the risks far outweigh the benefits.”

– Security Researcher at KubeCon Atlanta 2025

As time passes, the security gap between supported and unsupported versions will widen, making migration increasingly urgent but potentially more complex due to larger version jumps. This creates a dangerous scenario where organizations might be forced to rush migrations under pressure when a critical vulnerability is discovered.

Technical Support Challenges

Beyond security concerns, organizations that don’t migrate will face increasing difficulty obtaining technical support. Community forums and documentation will gradually shift focus to newer technologies, making troubleshooting and problem-solving more challenging. New Kubernetes versions may introduce compatibility issues that won’t be addressed in Ingress NGINX, potentially forcing difficult choices between updating your cluster or maintaining your ingress solution.

Additionally, as fewer organizations use Ingress NGINX, the pool of expertise available for hiring will shrink, creating staffing challenges for teams that need to maintain legacy deployments. This talent shortage can lead to increased operational costs and higher risk during incidents.

Gateway API Advantages Over Ingress Nginx

The Gateway API represents a significant evolution in how Kubernetes handles external traffic. Understanding its advantages helps teams embrace the migration as an opportunity for improvement rather than just a necessary maintenance task.

More Flexible Traffic Routing

Gateway API provides much more sophisticated traffic routing capabilities than the Ingress API. While Ingress NGINX required extensive use of custom annotations for anything beyond basic routing, Gateway API natively supports advanced scenarios like header-based routing, traffic splitting, and weighted routing. These capabilities are expressed in a standardized, portable way rather than using controller-specific annotations.

This expressiveness allows teams to implement complex traffic management patterns without resorting to workarounds or controller-specific features. For example, canary deployments, blue-green releases, and A/B testing become much more straightforward to implement and manage with Gateway API.

Better Multi-Tenant Support

One of the most significant limitations of Ingress NGINX was its weak support for multi-tenant environments. Gateway API addresses this through its role-based architecture, which clearly separates concerns between infrastructure providers, cluster operators, and application teams. This separation allows for more granular access control and better isolation between different teams and applications sharing the same cluster.

The multi-layered resource model (GatewayClass, Gateway, HTTPRoute) enables clear ownership boundaries and delegation of responsibilities. Infrastructure teams can manage the underlying Gateway resources while allowing application teams to create and manage their own routes, all within a secure and controlled framework.

Improved Security Model

Gateway API was designed with modern security principles in mind. Its resource model enforces clearer security boundaries and makes security configurations more explicit. Capabilities like TLS configuration are first-class concepts rather than annotations, making security policies more visible and auditable.

The API also provides better controls for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), rate limiting, and authentication integration. These security features are standardized across different implementations, reducing the risk of misconfigurations that could lead to security vulnerabilities.

Stronger Community Maintenance

Unlike Ingress NGINX, which struggled with maintainer resources, Gateway API has strong backing from major cloud providers, software vendors, and the open-source community. This broad support ensures continued development, timely security patches, and long-term viability. The clear governance model and active contributor base provide confidence that Gateway API will remain well-maintained for the foreseeable future.

The multi-vendor support also means that implementations are available for various environments and use cases, giving users more choice and flexibility while maintaining API compatibility. This ecosystem approach reduces the risk of vendor lock-in while still providing enterprise-grade support options.

KubeCon Atlanta Sessions About the Transition

KubeCon Atlanta 2025 featured numerous sessions dedicated to the Ingress NGINX retirement and migration strategies. These sessions provided valuable insights, practical guidance, and opportunities to learn from early adopters who have already completed their migrations. The conference reflected the Kubernetes community’s commitment to supporting users through this significant transition.

Attendees had access to hands-on workshops, technical deep dives, and strategy sessions covering all aspects of the migration process. Subject matter experts from various cloud providers and the Kubernetes contributor community shared their experiences and best practices to help organizations prepare for the change.

Session Type	Count	Key Focus Areas
Technical Talks	12	Migration strategies, Gateway API features, comparison of implementations
Workshops	8	Hands-on migration exercises, configuration conversion, testing methodologies
Case Studies	7	Real-world migration experiences, lessons learned, performance comparisons
Panel Discussions	5	Community impact, future of Kubernetes networking, ecosystem evolution

These sessions provided comprehensive coverage of the transition, from executive-level strategy discussions to detailed technical implementation guidance. Session recordings are available on the KubeCon website for those unable to attend in person, providing a valuable resource for teams planning their migrations.

Official Announcement Details

The official retirement announcement was delivered during the opening keynote by representatives from SIG Network and the Security Response Committee. The presentation detailed the timeline, reasoning behind the decision, and recommendations for users. Following the keynote, a dedicated Q&A session addressed community concerns and provided additional context on the decision-making process.

Migration Workshops and Demos

Practical workshops formed a core part of the transition support at KubeCon. These hands-on sessions guided participants through the migration process step by step, from initial assessment to final cutover. Workshops covered various scenarios, including simple configurations, complex routing setups, and enterprise-scale deployments.

Demo stations in the exhibition hall showcased different Gateway API implementations, allowing attendees to compare options and discuss their specific requirements with vendors and community contributors. These interactive demonstrations helped demystify the migration process and build confidence in the available alternatives.

Community Support Resources

A significant focus of KubeCon was introducing the expanded community support resources available to assist with migration. The newly formed Migration Working Group presented their comprehensive documentation, tooling, and support channels designed specifically to help organizations transitioning from Ingress NGINX.

The Migration Working Group announced regular office hours where users can get direct assistance from experts, along with a dedicated Slack channel for ongoing support. These resources complement the extensive written documentation and tooling already available on the Kubernetes website.

Case studies from early adopters provided valuable insights into real-world migration experiences. Organizations that have already completed their transitions shared their approaches, challenges they faced, and benefits they’ve realized from adopting Gateway API. These stories offered practical guidance and inspiration for teams beginning their migration journeys.

• Migration Documentation: Comprehensive guides available at gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io/guides/
• Community Slack: Dedicated #ingress-nginx-migration channel in Kubernetes Slack
• Migration Office Hours: Weekly virtual sessions with SIG Network experts
• GitHub Repository: Tools and examples at github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-migration
• Webinar Series: Monthly deep dives on specific migration topics

What This Means for Kubernetes’ Future

The retirement of Ingress NGINX represents more than just a change in one component—it signals broader shifts in the Kubernetes ecosystem and cloud-native architecture patterns. This transition offers insights into how Kubernetes is evolving and what users might expect in terms of future changes to other components.

Consolidating Around Gateway API

The move away from Ingress NGINX reflects a broader consolidation around Gateway API as the standard for Kubernetes service networking. This consolidation reduces fragmentation in the ecosystem, providing a more consistent experience across different environments and implementations. For users, this means better portability, clearer documentation, and more standardized behavior.

Gateway API serves as a unifying layer that allows for diverse implementations while maintaining API compatibility. This pattern—standardized APIs with pluggable implementations—represents the mature phase of the Kubernetes ecosystem, where core interfaces stabilize while still allowing for innovation and specialization in implementations.

Lessons for Other Kubernetes Components

The Ingress NGINX retirement provides important lessons for how the Kubernetes project manages the lifecycle of core components. The transition demonstrates a thoughtful approach to deprecation, with ample notice, clear migration paths, and extensive community support. This pattern will likely be followed for other components that reach their end of life or are superseded by more modern alternatives.

Community Reaction and Response

Initial community reaction to the retirement announcement was mixed, with some users expressing concern about the migration effort while others welcomed the move toward Gateway API. The Kubernetes maintainers responded with expanded support resources and clearer communication about the benefits of migration, helping to address concerns and build confidence in the transition plan.

The community’s ability to adapt to this significant change demonstrates the maturity of the Kubernetes ecosystem and the effectiveness of its governance processes. The transparent communication and collaborative approach to supporting users through the transition has strengthened trust in the project’s leadership and decision-making processes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Since the retirement announcement, several common questions have emerged from the community. These FAQs address the most pressing concerns and provide clear guidance for organizations navigating the transition from Ingress NGINX.

Many of these questions were addressed in detail during KubeCon sessions and have been compiled into a comprehensive FAQ document maintained by SIG Network. This living document is regularly updated as new questions arise and more information becomes available.

Will my existing Ingress Nginx deployments stop working after March 2026?

No, your existing deployments will not suddenly stop functioning after the retirement date. The code doesn’t include any time bombs or automatic disabling mechanisms. Your current installations will continue to operate as they do today, processing traffic and applying your configured routing rules.

However, it’s important to understand that while the software will continue to run, it will no longer receive updates of any kind. This means that over time, your deployment may develop compatibility issues with newer Kubernetes versions or cloud provider infrastructure. More critically, security vulnerabilities discovered after the retirement date will not be patched.

For these reasons, continuing to run Ingress NGINX after support ends should be considered a temporary measure only, with a clear plan to complete migration as soon as practical.

“Existing deployments of Ingress NGINX will continue to function and installation artifacts will remain available. However, SIG Network and the Security Response Committee recommend that all Ingress NGINX users begin migration to Gateway API or another Ingress controller immediately.”

– Official Kubernetes announcement

The key concern isn’t immediate functionality but the growing security and compatibility risks that will emerge over time without ongoing maintenance and updates.

Can I continue to use Ingress Nginx in air-gapped environments?

Yes, air-gapped environments can continue to use Ingress NGINX beyond the retirement date, and this is one of the few scenarios where long-term use might be justifiable. Since these environments are isolated from external networks, the security risks are somewhat mitigated. However, you should still perform your own security auditing and develop contingency plans for addressing any vulnerabilities that might be discovered internally.

How difficult is migration from Ingress Nginx to Gateway API?

The difficulty of migration varies significantly based on your specific deployment complexity and use of custom features. For basic deployments with standard routing configurations, the migration can be relatively straightforward using automated tools like ingress2gateway. These tools can automatically convert standard Ingress resources to equivalent Gateway API configurations with minimal manual intervention.

More complex deployments that heavily leverage Ingress NGINX annotations, custom configurations, or NGINX-specific features will require more careful planning and manual conversion work. The migration effort scales with the complexity and customization of your existing setup. Organizations with extensive custom configurations should allocate more time and resources for testing and validation during the migration process.

Are there any plans for a long-term support version of Ingress Nginx?

The Kubernetes project itself will not be offering a long-term support version of Ingress NGINX beyond the March 2026 retirement date. The official position is that Gateway API represents the future of Kubernetes networking, and resources are being directed toward supporting that transition rather than maintaining legacy components.

However, several commercial vendors have announced extended support offerings for organizations that need additional time to complete their migrations. These commercial options typically include security patches and technical support for periods ranging from one to three years beyond the official retirement date, though specific terms vary by vendor.

Will cloud providers continue to support Ingress Nginx in their managed Kubernetes offerings?

Most major cloud providers have already announced their migration plans away from Ingress NGINX in managed Kubernetes services. While specific timelines vary, all have indicated they will begin phasing out Ingress NGINX support in alignment with the Kubernetes project’s retirement timeline. Many are actively promoting migration to their Gateway API implementations, which often include cloud-specific optimizations and integration with their broader service portfolios.

Cloud providers are taking a staged approach to this transition, typically beginning with documentation updates and migration tooling, followed by deprecation warnings, and eventually removal from default installations. For precise details and timelines, consult your specific cloud provider’s Kubernetes documentation and roadmap.

• AWS EKS: Plans to mark Ingress NGINX as deprecated in April 2026 and remove from add-ons catalog in October 2026
• Google GKE: Will end support for Ingress NGINX in June 2026, with full migration to Gateway API recommended
• Microsoft AKS: Transitioning to Gateway API as default for new clusters starting January 2026, with Ingress NGINX support ending July 2026
• Digital Ocean: Removing Ingress NGINX from default installations in May 2026
• Oracle OKE: Will maintain support until December 2026 to provide additional migration time

The retirement of Ingress NGINX marks an important evolution in Kubernetes networking architecture. While the transition requires effort, it represents an opportunity to adopt more modern, secure, and flexible networking solutions. By planning your migration now, you can ensure a smooth transition and take advantage of the significant improvements offered by Gateway API.

Remember that the most important step is to begin your migration planning immediately, even if the actual implementation will be phased over time. The sooner you start, the more options you’ll have and the less risk you’ll face as the retirement date approaches.

For assistance with your migration journey, SlickFinch offers specialized consulting services to help you assess your current setup, design your migration strategy, and implement Gateway API or other appropriate alternative with minimal disruption to your operations.