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Community Blog Kubernetes Has Officially Announced Again, Emphasizing the Immediate Migration of Ingress NGINX

Kubernetes Has Officially Announced Again, Emphasizing the Immediate Migration of Ingress NGINX

The Kubernetes Steering Committee and Security Response Committee have once again emphasized the immediate migration of Ingress NGINX.

By Wang Chen

1. Background

In November 2025, the Kubernetes contributors community announced that the Kubernetes SIG Network and Security Response Committee would retire Ingress NGINX, with key points including:

● Ingress NGINX will make every effort to maintain the service until March 2026

● No new versions will be released

● No vulnerabilities will be fixed

● There will be no updates for any newly discovered security vulnerabilities

● The GitHub repository will be set to read-only and for reference only

● Existing Ingress NGINX deployments will continue to run, and the installation files will remain available

2. Latest

On January 29, the Kubernetes Steering Committee and Security Response Committee issued a notice again on kubernetes.io "Ingress NGINX: Statement from the Kubernetes Steering and Security Response Committees", emphasizing the urgent need to migrate from Ingress NGINX.

1

Original Announcement:

In March 2026, Kubernetes will stop supporting Ingress NGINX, a critical component currently used in approximately half of cloud-native environments. The announcement of the project stopping support has been publicly communicated for years due to the urgent need for contributors and maintainers. After the project stops, no vulnerability fixes, security patches, or other updates will be issued. This issue cannot be ignored, postponed, or handled at the last minute. We must emphasize the seriousness of the situation and the importance of starting to migrate to Gateway API or other third-party Ingress controllers and alternatives immediately.

It is explicitly stated: Continuing to use Ingress NGINX after it stops support will expose you and your users to security attack risks. Existing alternatives are not direct replacements, and migration requires time and engineering resources. About half of the users will be affected. You only have two months to prepare.

Existing deployments will continue to run unless actively checked; otherwise, impacts may only be discovered after an attack. In most cases, the following command can be executed with cluster admin privileges to check if Ingress NGINX is being relied upon:

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces --selector app.kubernetes.io/name=ingress-nginx

Despite being popular and widely used by companies of various sizes, and maintainers repeatedly calling for help, the project has continually lacked sufficient contributors. According to internal research by Datadog, approximately 50% of cloud-native environments rely on this tool, but in recent years, it has only been maintained part-time by one or two maintainers. The lack of sufficient personnel to ensure the tool's security has made the most responsible choice to gradually stop maintenance and turn to modern solutions like Gateway API.

This decision was not made lightly. While it may seem inconvenient now, it is necessary for the safety of all users and the entire ecosystem. Unfortunately, the flexibility that was once a great advantage in the design of Ingress NGINX has now become a difficult burden to resolve. The accumulation of technical debt and design flaws has led to ongoing security vulnerabilities, making it difficult to continue maintenance even if there were resources.

We jointly issue this statement to emphasize the scale of this change and the serious risks posed by ignoring the issue. Please make sure to check your cluster immediately. If relying on Ingress NGINX, migration plans must begin as soon as possible.

Thank you all,

Kubernetes Steering Committee

Kubernetes Security Response Committee

3. Active Dissemination

Considering that this official announcement from Kubernetes may not reach all users currently using Ingress NGINX, the Higress team is working hard to play a role in actively disseminating this information through the Higress open-source community and the resources of Alibaba Cloud's customer service and experience team.

(Recommended) Migration plan and service support for Ingress NGINX to Higress Enterprise Edition

Open-source migration instructions from Ingress NGINX to Higress:

Developers Migration Container Service Open Source Cloud migration Containers Kubernetes cloud native K8s Higress Gateway API Ingress Nginx Security migration
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