Traefik has established itself as the standard for Kubernetes networking.
The Kubernetes community has officially retired Ingress NGINX this month due to years of insufficient resources. This decision has triggered a migration rush that is now funneling toward a single open source beneficiary, with Traefik Labs announcing this development at KubeCon today.
For a considerable time, the kubernetes/ingress-nginx project was surviving on borrowed time, mainly maintained by a small number of volunteers dedicating their evenings and weekends. It accrued technical debt that the community was unable to manage sustainably.
In November 2025, the Kubernetes SIG Network made it official that Ingress NGINX would be retired in March 2026. There would be no more releases, bug fixes, or security patches. The Kubernetes Steering Committee emphasized in January 2026 that organizations staying on Ingress NGINX post-retirement “are vulnerable to attack.”
Ingress NGINX was not merely a minor component; depending on the analysis, it was utilized by between 41 and 50 percent of publicly accessible Kubernetes clusters. It was the default ingress controller in several platforms, including RKE2 (SUSE's enterprise Kubernetes distribution), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Alibaba ACK.
The retirement timeline prompted an almost simultaneous migration event throughout the industry, and at KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe in London today, Traefik Labs revealed the outcome: IBM Cloud, Nutanix, OVHcloud, SUSE, TIBCO, and other platform vendors have all independently chosen Traefik Proxy as their successor.
The primary reason for selecting Traefik is its compatibility. Most ingress controllers necessitate that teams revise their Ingress resources when transitioning from Ingress NGINX, as each controller interprets annotations differently. Traefik developed a specific NGINX Provider that converts Ingress NGINX annotations into Traefik configurations at runtime, allowing teams to transition the controller without changing any Ingress resources.
The company asserts it covers over 90 percent of the annotations actively used in real migrations, reaching this figure by equipping migration tools and analyzing actual annotation usage patterns rather than trying to support every annotation in the specification.
The vendor quotes included in the announcement showcase the variety of use cases these platforms address. Nutanix’s Dan Ciruli mentioned that K3s has utilized Traefik as its default ingress controller for years, asserting that the retirement “validates the decision we made years ago.”
SUSE’s Peter Smails confirmed that Traefik would become the default in RKE2 starting with v1.36, replacing Ingress NGINX as the distribution's default. OVHcloud’s Jacques Murez noted the choice was influenced by Gateway API readiness. TIBCO’s Devu Heda highlighted that Traefik already supports ingress for customer deployments and TIBCO’s own SaaS control plane infrastructure.
This last point is significant for Traefik Labs as they outline their commercial prospects. The company's open source product, Traefik Proxy, is MIT-licensed and drives the announced migration wave. However, Traefik Labs also offers Traefik Hub, an enterprise platform that builds upon Traefik Proxy by adding features like API Gateway, AI Gateway, MCP Gateway, and API lifecycle management, deployable via a simple Helm chart upgrade.
From the company's viewpoint, the retirement of Ingress NGINX is not merely a migration event but also an opportunity: engineering teams currently enhancing their networking layer are in a good position to consider expanding that investment into API management.
Traefik Proxy boasts 3.4 billion downloads on Docker Hub and 62,000 stars on GitHub, making it one of the most widely used open source networking projects in cloud-native infrastructure. Founded in 2016 by Emile Vauge, who now serves as CTO, Traefik Labs appointed Sudeep Goswami as CEO in February 2024.
The company operates from both France and the United States and has raised $11.1 million across two funding rounds, supported by investors such as Balderton Capital, Kima Ventures, and Elaia, which is a modest capital base for a company whose open source software supports a considerable portion of the world’s containerized production workloads.
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Traefik has established itself as the standard for Kubernetes networking.
This month, the Kubernetes community officially retired Ingress NGINX following years of inadequate resources. The ensuing rush to migrate is coalescing around a single open source beneficiary, with Traefik Labs announcing this at KubeCon.