Routing Traffic on Kubernetes (EKS) with the F5 NGINX Ingress Controller
If you have run anything on Kubernetes, you have almost certainly used ingress-nginx - the community controller that fronts inbound traffic for roughly half of all clusters. That era is ending. In this post we will look at why you need to move, and then build a complete, working setup on AWS EKS using the F5 NGINX Ingress Controller instead: an EKS cluster provisioned with Terraform, a Network…
If you have deployed anything on Kubernetes, chances are you have utilized ingress-nginx – the widely adopted community controller that handles ingress traffic for approximately half of all clusters. However, this era is coming to an end. In this article, we will examine the reasons for transitioning away from ingress-nginx and demonstrate how to set up a fully functional system on AWS EKS using the F5 NGINX Ingress Controller – a more robust alternative.
First and foremost, it is crucial to understand that the community-maintained kubernetes/ingress-nginx project, which employs nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ annotations, has been officially retired. The Kubernetes Steering and Security Response Committees announced the retirement in early 2026, following years of warnings about the project's dire need for maintainers.
Best-effort maintenance ceased around March 2026, resulting in no new releases, bug fixes, or security patches thereafter – the repository became read-only. Existing installations continue to function, and the Kubernetes Ingress API remains unaffected; however, running an unpatched, externally exposed proxy is not a desirable situation.
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