What winning migrations actually looks like after the community’s ingress controller retirement

Jordan GardnerProduct Marketing Manager | F5 NGINX

Karthik KrishnaswamyDirector, Product Marketing | F5

It's been more than half a year since the community-maintained Kubernetes ingress controller, Ingress NGINX, went into retirement. It forced platform teams across the industry to make decisions about a critical piece of infrastructure, and they started asking the right question: "What’s the right long-term choice?"

We're having that conversation with industry leaders every day. Many organizations across a variety of industries are transitioning to F5 NGINX Ingress Controller to obtain an enterprise-grade Kubernetes ingress controller with a low-risk migration path. Here are three examples that demonstrate why.

A major insurance provider migrates with zero learning curve

A major insurance provider realized its mission-critical applications, delivered by a community-maintained ingress controller in Azure, were at risk. The deprecation wasn't a line item in the organization’s budget; it was an urgent threat to business continuity. The provider needed a solution that offered long-term stability, hardened releases, and enterprise-level support without a painful migration.

The seamless transition to F5 NGINX Ingress Controller was a primary driver for the insurance provider’s decision. Why? Because it's the same underlying NGINX data plane. F5 NGINX Ingress Controller supports commonly used community ingress controller ingress-nginx annotations, and we’re continuing to add more so that teams can keep their existing configurations and workflows. There's nothing new to learn. It's essentially the same engine under the hood, but backed by a strategic partner with a clear roadmap—a mature product with over 10 years of development, more than 150 contributors, 100+ releases, and many, many enterprise users.

A large insurance platform protects uptime for revenue-generating apps

Another leader in the insurance space, responsible for large-scale Kubernetes clusters running revenue-generating quoting and policy applications, faced the same challenge. This company’s priority was uptime.

For this insurance provider, the key differentiator was a feature inherent to our enterprise-grade solution: dynamic reconfiguration. F5 NGINX Ingress Controller applies routing changes on the fly with zero dropped traffic. This eliminated the risk of outages during configuration updates and preserved the company’s existing infrastructure pipelines with minimal re-engineering.

A regional airline makes a forced migration feel routine

A regional airline was already looking to standardize its Kubernetes ingress layer to eliminate operational risk, but the community retirement forced the airline’s hand. Its teams already knew and trusted NGINX.

By moving to F5 NGINX Ingress Controller, the airline kept the same data plane and native Ingress resources. There was no need to rewrite applications, retrain teams, or re-architect its systems on a compressed timeline. F5 provided the airline with tools to make the migration straightforward, including annotation mapping and access to our solution architects.

A simpler, more stable architecture

The message from these industry leaders is clear: the scramble for an ingress controller solution has evolved into a strategic re-evaluation of infrastructure. While the initial reaction may have been a quick jump to another open-source tool, the long-term view requires something more: an enterprise-grade solution from a partner you can trust.

F5 NGINX Ingress Controller takes a simple approach, leveraging NGINX native capabilities rather than heavyweight programmability extensions with Lua scripting. The result is a controller that's more responsive to cluster changes, delivers more stable memory usage, and provides consistent and stable custom resource definitions (CRDs) and annotations. It also includes advanced functionality like active health checks of workload pods, high availability, programmability, and integrated F5 WAF for NGINX, all fully supported with a long-term roadmap.

A clear path to the future with Gateway API

Gateway API is the evolution of ingress. It reduces friction between Devs and Ops, supports multi-tenancy natively, and opens the door to advanced traffic management like traffic splitting and weighted load balancing without bolting on a service mesh. For organizations already running Kubernetes in production, it's the natural next step.

F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric is Gateway API–conformant and built on the same trusted NGINX data plane. It includes the enterprise-grade traffic management, security, and configuration features you expect from NGINX Ingress Controller including advanced rate limiting, JWT authentication, session persistence, and Layer 4 protocol support. Beyond standard ingress capabilities, it also supports the Gateway API inference extension, enabling teams to deliver AI workloads like model serving and inference routing through the same gateway that handles their apps and APIs. One NGINX gateway for serving apps, APIs, and inference workloads.

As AI adoption accelerates, securing those interactions becomes just as critical as delivering them. F5 NGINX Gateway Fabric integrates with F5 AI Guardrails, which provides full inspection of prompts and responses, data sanitization and redaction, data leak prevention, fine-grained access control, and detection and prevention of attacks on LLMs, including prompt injection and unauthorized outputs. It's a unified approach to securing AI operations, wherever they run.

That regional airline? It’s already planning its move from ingress to Gateway API. Because the airline chose a partner with a clear development roadmap, it won't be scrambling again. The transition is a planned evolution, not another fire drill.

By choosing a partner with a dedicated development plan, you ensure your application delivery remains secure, performant, and supported, no matter how the unsupported open-source landscape shifts.

Simplify your migration by using our configuration tools to assess your current setup, or start a free trial of F5 NGINX Ingress Controller to explore enterprise features and support.

About the Authors

Jordan GardnerProduct Marketing Manager | F5 NGINX

More blogs by Jordan Gardner

Karthik KrishnaswamyDirector, Product Marketing | F5

More blogs by Karthik Krishnaswamy