The Kubernetes community retired Ingress NGINX this month due to years of under-resourcing. The ensuing migration scramble is consolidating around a key open source beneficiary, with Traefik Labs announcing that outcome at KubeCon today.
The kubernetes/ingress-nginx project had long suffered from limited resources. Primarily maintained by a few volunteers on their own time, it amassed technical debt that the community struggled to manage sustainably.
In November 2025, Kubernetes SIG Network officially announced that ingress NGINX would retire by March 2026. This meant no further releases, bug fixes, or security patches. The Kubernetes Steering Committee emphasized in January 2026 that organizations continuing to use ingress NGINX post-retirement “are vulnerable to attack.”
Ingress NGINX was a significant component, with analyses showing that 41 to 50 percent of internet-facing Kubernetes clusters relied on it. It was the default ingress controller in RKE2 (SUSE’s enterprise Kubernetes distribution), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Alibaba ACK, among others.
The retirement deadline sparked a widespread migration across the industry, culminating in today’s announcement at KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe in London: IBM Cloud, Nutanix, OVHcloud, SUSE, TIBCO, and other platform vendors have independently chosen Traefik Proxy as their replacement.
Traefik’s appeal primarily lies in its compatibility. Unlike other ingress controllers, Traefik provides an NGINX Provider that translates ingress NGINX annotations into Traefik configuration at runtime, allowing for a seamless swap without modifying any Ingress resources.
The company claims to cover more than 90 percent of annotation use in real migrations, based on migration tooling data and usage analysis instead of blanket specification support.
Comments from vendors reflect the diverse platform applications. Nutanix’s Dan Ciruli noted that K3s has long used Traefik as the default ingress controller, stating that the retirement “validates the decision we made years ago.”
SUSE’s Peter Smails confirmed that Traefik will become the default in RKE2 starting with v1.36. OVHcloud’s Jacques Murez highlighted Gateway API readiness. TIBCO’s Devu Heda praised Traefik’s role in both customer deployments and TIBCO’s own SaaS infrastructure.
This migration is seen by Traefik Labs not merely as a logistical shift but as an opportunity to encourage further investment in API management. The free, MIT-licensed Traefik Proxy underpins today’s migration, while Traefik Labs also offers Traefik Hub, an enterprise platform with extended capabilities, via a simple Helm chart upgrade.
Traefik Proxy boasts 3.4 billion Docker Hub downloads and 62,000 GitHub stars, making it a prominent open source networking project in cloud-native infrastructure. Founded in 2016 by Emile Vauge, now CTO, with Sudeep Goswami appointed CEO in February 2024, the company is headquartered in both France and the US. It has raised $11.1 million in funding from Balderton Capital, Kima Ventures, and Elaia, a modest sum for a company whose software fronts a significant portion of global containerized production workloads.