Ingress NGINX Is Retiring. Here’s Your Path Forward with HAProxy

If you were at KubeCon North America this past week, you felt the buzz from this announcement: the community Ingress NGINX project is being retired. Best-effort maintenance will stop in March 2026, after which there will be no new releases, bugfixes, or security updates.

This news has understandably caused a wave of anxiety. Ingress NGINX is one of the most popular controllers, and with the community now racing to find stable, supported, and future-proof alternatives, we've been inundated with questions.

Our message is simple: We are here to help.

Here at HAProxy, we have a clear path to help Ingress NGINX users migrate to a more powerful, reliable, and fully-supported solution. Whether you need an immediate fix or a long-term strategic upgrade, we have you covered.

Register for our webinar Life After Ingress NGINX: A Zero-Stress Migration Guide to HAProxy and listen to our experts and participate in the live Q&A.

Immediate choice: HAProxy Ingress Controller

For teams facing a tight migration deadline, the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller is the easiest, most immediate, and most direct replacement. You get a stable, production-ready solution right now for the smoothest transition possible.

This is the most direct path if you need to migrate on a timeline and are looking for an immediate, production-ready replacement.

While no migration is zero-effort, the HAProxy Ingress Controller offers a manageable, well-documented path with direct equivalents for the most commonly used Ingress NGINX annotations.

The HAProxy Ingress Controller was developed as a major alternative to the NGINX Ingress Controller. Over time, its annotation system has been built out to provide equivalent functionality for the most critical, high-usage features that most users rely on:

  • nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/load-balance -> haproxy.org/load-balance

  • nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/backend-protocol -> haproxy.org/backend-protocol

  • nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-connect-timeout -> haproxy.org/proxy-connect-timeout

  • nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/cors-allow-origin -> haproxy.org/cors-allow-origin

  • nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/affinity -> haproxy.org/affinity

  • ...and so on for things like rate limiting, timeouts, and cookies.

It's not a 100% drop-in replacement because it intentionally handles complex/unsafe things (like snippets) differently. Most of the time, you can find/replace the annotation prefixes.

We are committed to being transparent about where configurations differ and will provide clear, documented alternatives for NGINX-specific features.

Why HAProxy Ingress Controller is an upgrade, not just a replacement

The HAProxy Ingress Controller is built on the same HAProxy core that has been battle-tested for 20+ years, powering many of the world's largest websites. It's not just a replacement; it's a significant upgrade.

  • Superior Performance: In our public, reproducible benchmarks, the HAProxy Ingress Controller consistently handles more than double the request throughput of Ingress NGINX while consuming significantly less CPU.

  • Advanced Load Balancing: This is our core strength. You get immediate access to more sophisticated algorithms like "least connections" and "source IP hash," giving you far more precise control over your traffic distribution.

  • Better Observability: Get a richer set of native Prometheus metrics out-of-the-box, without needing extra sidecars or exporters.

  • Zero-Downtime Reloads: HAProxy is famous for its ability to apply configuration changes with zero dropped connections - a critical operational win.

  • Robust Protocol Support: It offers first-class, reliable support for Layer 4 load balancing (e.g., for database connections, gRPC, or real-time streaming) in addition to its powerful Layer 7 (HTTP/S) capabilities.

This is all available as a free, open-source project with everything you need to make the switch.

Enterprise power when you need it

For teams that need more, HAProxy One provides a complete application delivery and security platform. The data plane  (HAProxy Enterprise) is an enterprise load balancer and API gateway built on the battle-tested open-source HAProxy foundation, with next-generation intelligent security layers. The control plane (HAProxy Fusion) provides centralized management and observability of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments, with Kubernetes service discovery enabling automated routing for dynamic backends. With 24/7 support and enterprise-grade features, this is the optimal solution for larger organizations that need Kubernetes traffic management at scale.

Future proof: the HAProxy Unified Gateway

The Kubernetes community’s official long-term recommendation is to move toward the new Gateway API. We are all-in on this transition.

This week, we announced the beta of the HAProxy Unified Gateway. This is our next-generation controller, built from the ground up to provide a single, unified way to manage both Kubernetes Gateway API (available now) and Ingress resources (available in 2026). With support for both resource types, users will be able to:

  1. Adopt HAProxy Unified Gateway.

  2. Use it in "Ingress mode" for an easy migration from Ingress Controller.

  3. Enable Gateway API resources on that same controller, migrating from Ingress to Gateway API resources at their own pace.

This is the best part: making the change to the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller now sets you up for future success.

It's simple to migrate from HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller to HAProxy Unified Gateway because they share the same core HAProxy technology and an identical configuration philosophy. By migrating to the HAProxy Ingress Controller today, you solve your immediate Ingress NGINX problem with a superior controller and place your team on the clearest, most proven path to the future of Kubernetes networking.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Mostly no. For many resources, you will only need to update the ingressClassName. Our migration guides will clearly document the mapping for any annotations that differ.

Secure your roadmap before the rush

The clock is ticking on Ingress NGINX. Waiting until the 2026 deadline means risking security debt and competing for support during the global scramble.

Avoid the bottleneck. Choose your path below to secure your infrastructure today:

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