Nginx isn’t dead, Ingress-Nginx is

Ingress-nginx retirement

Last November, we saw that ingress-nginx is heading toward retirement. That does not mean NGINX itself is going away. That’s not true at all.

Ingress-nginx is a Kubernetes Ingress Controller that translates Kubernetes Ingress resources into NGINX configuration. It is a community project under the Kubernetes GitHub org.
NGINX itself is a full-featured web server and reverse proxy maintained by F5. It continues to be actively developed.
If ingress-nginx is retired, that only affects that specific controller implementation — NOT NGINX as a technology.
F5 maintains its own NGINX Ingress Controller, AND there are also Gateway API implementations that use NGINX under the hood.
So NGINX is still alive and well — it’s just that one particular Kubernetes ingress controller implementation that is reaching end-of-life.

Let’s agree on terminology:

Nginx ⇒ a perfromant webserver/reverse-proxy. Maintained by F5. It’s configured via a File called nginx.conf
Ingress API ⇒ A declarative kubernetes API that lets you define how incoming traffic is routed withing your cluster (hence the “in” part of “ingress”)
Ingress API Controller ⇒ A software that implements that API, and translates, backed by a reverse proxy, like nginx, traefik, envoy …etc. The controller maps the YAML file to actual configs, like nginx.conf in the case of nginx.
Gateway API ⇒ An API that’s more feature-rich than the Ingress API
Gateway API Controller ⇒ A software that implements the Gateway API, backed by something like nginx, traefik, envoy, …etc