Announcing Ingress2Gateway 1.0: Your Path to Gateway API

Summary

The release of Ingress2Gateway 1.0 provides a stable migration assistant for transitioning Kubernetes networking from Ingress-NGINX to the Gateway API. The tool automates the translation of Ingress resources and implementation-specific annotations into Gateway API manifests while identifying configuration gaps and suggesting alternatives.

Key Points

• Version 1.0 expands Ingress-NGINX annotation support from three to over 30 common annotations, including CORS, backend TLS, regex matching, and path rewrites.
• The tool performs behavioral equivalence testing via controller-level integration tests in live clusters to verify routing, redirects, and rewrites rather than just comparing YAML structure.
• Supports translation via file input, specific namespaces, or entire clusters using the print command.
• Includes an --emitter flag to output implementation-specific extensions for agentgateway, envoy-gateway, or kgateway.
• Provides automated warnings and suggestions for untranslatable configurations, such as nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet.

Technical Details

Ingress2Gateway functions as a translation layer that maps Ingress-NGINX resources to Gateway, HTTPRoute, and Listener resources within the Gateway API. The 1.0 release includes updated logic for regex matching; because Ingress-NGINX regex matches are case-insensitive prefix matches by default, the tool automatically modifies path patterns (e.g., adding (?i) and .*) to maintain functional parity. For annotations such as nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-{read,send}-timeout, the tool performs a best-effort mapping to the HTTPRoute.timeouts.request field.

The tool's validation process is backed by integration tests that spin up both Ingress-NGINX and multiple Gateway API controllers to compare runtime behavior. While many annotations like enable-cors map directly to Gateway API filters, certain features like proxy-body-size or configuration-snippet are flagged as unsupported or untranslatable. For these cases, the tool notifies the user that they must manually check implementation-specific documentation or use specific emitters to capture specialized behaviors.

Impact / Why It Matters

With the Ingress-NGINX retirement scheduled for March 2026, Ingress2Gateway provides a structured path for organizations to modernize their networking stack with reduced risk of configuration drift. It reduces the manual overhead of re-engineering complex, annotation-heavy Ingress logic into the modular Gateway API.