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Migration Plan for Wallarm NGINX Ingress Controller Customers

In November 2025, the Kubernetes community announced the retirement of the Community Ingress NGINX project, with best-effort maintenance ending in March 2026. This page outlines how this change affects Wallarm's NGINX-based Ingress deployment artifact and the available migration paths.

Wallarm's NGINX-based Ingress controller support timeline

Wallarm currently provides a Wallarm Ingress Controller based on the Community Ingress NGINX. To align with the upstream project's lifecycle, the following support plan applies:

  • Wallarm will fully support this controller — including new feature releases — until March 2026

  • Within this support window, the controller remains suitable for:

    • Evaluations and PoC deployments
    • Production workloads, provided you plan a migration before the end of support

  • After March 2026:

    • The controller will remain functional, but
    • It will not receive upstream changes, security updates, or further enhancements
    • New capabilities will be delivered through new deployment artifacts (see below)

New deployment options

Wallarm provides several alternatives to the Community Ingress NGINX-based controller, including an option available today and additional long-term deployment artifacts planned for 2026.

Alternative available today: Istio/Envoy connector

Today, Wallarm offers an Istio/Envoy-based connector.

This is not a direct replacement for the NGINX Ingress Controller and may require architectural changes in how traffic enters and flows through the cluster.

It is a suitable option for customers who are already using, or planning to adopt, Envoy-based ingress gateways or service-mesh-style architectures.

Wallarm Ingress Controller based on OSS Ingress NGINX (March 2026)

Wallarm will provide a new deployment artifact based on the open-source Ingress NGINX.

  • Planned availability: March 2026

  • Recommended for: customers who prefer to continue using an NGINX-based ingress controller

Wallarm Node deployment based on Kubernetes Gateway API (first half of 2026)

Wallarm will also introduce a new deployment artifact that leverages the Kubernetes Gateway API, the modern, Kubernetes-recommended standard for traffic ingress.

  • Planned availability: first half of 2026

  • Recommended for: customers adopting Gateway API in their clusters or moving toward modern Kubernetes networking patterns

This artifact will provide a native integration point for Wallarm traffic processing using the Gateway API's extensible and role-oriented model.

Next steps for customers

No immediate changes are required in your existing clusters. However, we encourage you to review the available options as you plan your infrastructure roadmap for 2026.

Before March 2026

Customers may choose one of the following paths:

When new deployment artifacts become available

  • Migrate to the Wallarm deployment based on OSS Ingress NGINX (planned for March 2026).

  • Plan adoption of the Wallarm Gateway API–based artifact (planned for first half of 2026).