When the Kubernetes community announced the retirement of ingress-nginx, confusion rippled across deployments worldwide. Many practitioners didn’t realize there was still an actively maintained, NGINX-based option available, and some even thought NGINX itself was going away. Others worried the Ingress API was being deprecated entirely. The truth? NGINX is here to stay, with NGINX-based ingress and gateway solutions like NGINX Ingress Controller (nginx-ingress) and NGINX Gateway Fabric thriving within the open ecosystem. These robust, open source projects are actively developed, maintained, and innovated upon by the dedicated NGINX team, ensuring the community continues to benefit from reliable, high-performing solutions for modern application delivery.

In this talk, we’ll untangle the naming mess that’s been confusing operators for years. We’ll walk through the history of how two projects with similar names came to be, clarify what ingress-nginx’s retirement actually means for your clusters, and explore the options available to you today. There are many good options out there. Whether you’re currently running ingress-nginx, experimenting with Gateway API, or considering other solutions entirely, this talk is about understanding your actual choices and evaluating what makes sense for your environment.We’ll dig into the differences between these projects, discuss when to stay with Ingress versus moving to Gateway API, share actionable migration paths, and explore what operators should think about when making the switch. Expect some light roasting of whoever approved these names.