Before You Migrate: Five Surprising Ingress-NGINX Behaviors You Need to Know

Before You Migrate: Five Surprising Ingress-NGINX Behaviors You Need to Know 1. Regex matches are prefix-based and case insensitive 2. The nginx. ingress. kubernetes. io/use-regex applies to all paths of a host across all (Ingress-NGINX) Ingresses 3. Rewrite target implies regex 4. Requests missing a trailing slash are redirected to the same path with a trailing slash 5. Ingress-NGINX normalizes URLs Conclusion As announced November 2025, Kubernetes will retire Ingress-NGINX in March 2026. Despite its widespread usage, Ingress-NGINX is full of surprising defaults and side effects that are probably present in your cluster today. This blog highlights these behaviors so that you can migrate away safely and make a conscious decision about which behaviors to keep. This post also compares Ingress-NGINX with Gateway API and shows you how to preserve Ingress-NGINX behavior in Gateway API.