Navigating the NGINX Ingress retirement: A practical guide to migration on AWS
Networking & Content Delivery Blog
This article provides a practical migration guide from NGINX Ingress Controller to AWS Load Balancer Controller following NGINX's retirement in March 2026.
- NGINX Ingress retirement announced; affects ~50% of cloud-native environments
- No security patches or updates available after March 2026
- AWS Load Balancer Controller offers native AWS integrations and managed infrastructure
- ALB handles Layer 7 routing; NLB handles Layer 4 high-performance traffic
- AWS LBC supports URL/host header rewriting natively as of October 2025
- TLS certificates managed via AWS Certificate Manager instead of Kubernetes Secrets
- AWS LBC v3.0 supports Kubernetes Gateway API for future-proof architecture
- Detailed migration examples provided for URI rewriting and TLS termination
- Migration checklist covers pre, during, and post-migration phases
Organizations should audit NGINX configurations, migrate to AWS Load Balancer Controller for security and compliance, then plan transition to Kubernetes Gateway API for long-term standards-based portability.
The AWS News Feed is currently looking for gold sponsors. If you want to support the AWS community and reach a large audience of AWS professionals, consider sponsoring the AWS News Feed.
Related articles
2026
2026
2026
2026
The AWS News Feed is currently looking for silver sponsors. If you want to support the AWS community and reach a large audience of AWS professionals, consider sponsoring the AWS News Feed.