Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ingress NGINX Controller, the trusty staple of countless platform engineering toolkits, is about to be put out to pasture. This news was announced by the Kubernetes community recently, and very quickly circulated throughout the cloud-native space. It’s big news for any platform team that currently uses the NGINX Controller because, as of March 26, 2026, there will be no more bug fixes, no more critical vulnerability patches and no more enhancements when Kubernetes continues to release new versions.

Organizations are struggling with rising operational complexity, fragmented tools, and inconsistent security enforcement as Kubernetes becomes the foundation for modern application platforms. As a result of this complexity and fragmentation, platform teams are increasingly burdened by the need to stitch together separate solutions for networking, network security, and observability.

If you’ve managed traffic in Kubernetes, you’ve likely worked with Ingress controllers. For years, Ingress has been the standard way to expose HTTP and HTTPS services. But in practice, it often came with trade-offs. Controller-specific annotations were required to unlock critical features, the line between infrastructure and application responsibilities was unclear, and configurations often became tied to the implementation rather than the intent.

The Tigera team recently returned from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America and CalicoCon 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. It was great, as always, to attend these events, feel the energy of our community, and hold in-depth discussions at the booth and in our dedicated sessions that revealed specific, critical shifts shaping the future of cloud-native platforms.

When your Kubernetes cluster handles thousands of workloads, every millisecond counts. And that pressure is no longer the exception; it is the norm. According to a recent CNCF survey, 93% of organizations are using, piloting, or evaluating Kubernetes, revealing just how pervasive it has become. Kubernetes has grown from a promising orchestration tool into the backbone of modern infrastructure. As adoption climbs, so does pressure to keep performance high, networking efficient, and security airtight.

The Ingress NGINX Controller is approaching retirement, which has pushed many teams to evaluate their long-term ingress strategy. The familiar Ingress resource has served well, but it comes with clear limits: annotations that differ by vendor, limited extensibility, and few options for separating operator and developer responsibilities. The Gateway API addresses these challenges with a more expressive, standardized, and portable model for service networking.

Kubernetes has transformed how teams build and scale applications, but it has also introduced new layers of complexity. Platform and DevOps teams must now integrate and manage multiple technologies: CNI, ingress and egress gateways, service mesh, and more across increasingly large and dynamic environments.

As organizations scale Kubernetes and hybrid infrastructures, many are realizing that more tools don’t mean better security. A recent Microsoft report found that organizations with 16+ point solutions see 2.8x more data security incidents than those with fewer tools. Yet platform teams are still expected to deliver resilience and performance across containers, VMs, and bare metal, often while juggling fragmented tools that introduce risk, downtime, and complexity.

We’re excited to announce the release of Calico v3.31, which brings a wave of new features and improvements. For a quick look, here are the key updates and improvements in this release.

When deploying a Kubernetes cluster, a critical architectural decision is how pods on different nodes communicate. The choice of networking mode directly impacts performance, scalability, and operational overhead. Selecting the wrong mode for your environment can lead to persistent performance issues, troubleshooting complexity, and scalability bottlenecks. The core problem is that pod IPs are virtual.