A Detailed Look at the Calico Ingress Gateway

The Role of the Calico Ingress Gateway in Modern Kubernetes So Why an Ingress Gateway? What is the Calico Ingress Gateway? Why Kubernetes Gateway API Matters Now More Than Ever Why Calico Ingress Gateway? How Calico Ingress Gateway Fits into the Calico Platform Calico Ingress Gateway Capabilities Based on the Envoy Gateway Advanced Traffic Management Resilience Features Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Comprehensive Observability Easy Deployment and Configuration Future Developments for Calico Ingress Gateway Conclusion: Preparing for a Post–Ingress NGINX World The Kubernetes community recently announced that Ingress NGINX, one of the most widely used Ingress controllers, will be retired. This change means teams need to plan for a secure, modern, and future-proof alternative for managing Kubernetes traffic. The Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee confirmed that the project will only receive basic maintenance until March 2026. After that, there will be no new releases, bug fixes, or security updates. For organizations that have depended on Ingress NGINX for many years, this is more than a routine update. It represents a major change in how Kubernetes ingress traffic will need to be managed going forward. This raises an important question: What should replace Ingress NGINX in a way that is secure, modern, standardized, and reliable for the long term? As the industry moves toward the Kubernetes Gateway API and expectations for security and reliability grow, this is the right time to adopt an ingress solution designed for the future. Calico Ingress Gateway is a 100% upstream distribution of the Envoy Gateway, supported by Tigera’s enterprise expertise, and offers a smooth and dependable path forward. Managing traffic in Kubernetes environments presents serious security and operational challenges. Traditional ingress solutions lack flexibility, rely on proprietary configurations, and offer limited traffic control, creating security gaps and inefficiencies. What’s needed is a more flexible, scalable, and policy-driven approach to ingress traffic management. Enter Calico Ingress Gateway—built to eliminate these limitations while enhancing security, visibility, and control over ingress traffic at scale.