The Kubernetes community retired Ingress NGINX this month after years of under-resourcing. The migration scramble it triggered is now consolidating around one open source beneficiary, and Traefik Labs announced that convergence at KubeCon today.
For years, the kubernetes/ingress-nginx project ran on borrowed time. Maintained largely by one or two volunteers working evenings and weekends, it had accumulated technical debt that the community couldn’t sustainably address.
In November 2025, Kubernetes SIG Network made it official: ingress NGINX would retire in March 2026. No more releases, no more bug fixes, no more security patches. The Kubernetes Steering Committee followed up in January 2026 with language that left little interpretive room: organisations remaining on ingress NGINX after retirement “are vulnerable to attack.”
Ingress NGINX was not a minor component. Depending on the analysis, between 41 and 50 percent of internet-facing Kubernetes clusters used it. It shipped as the default ingress controller in RKE2 (SUSE’s enterprise Kubernetes distribution), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and Alibaba ACK, among others.
The retirement deadline created a near-simultaneous migration event across the industry, and at KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe in London today, Traefik Labs announced the outcome of that scramble: IBM Cloud, Nutanix, OVHcloud, SUSE, TIBCO, and additional platform vendors have each independently selected Traefik Proxy as their replacement.
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The technical case for Traefik’s selection rests primarily on compatibility. Most ingress controllers require teams to rewrite their Ingress resources when migrating away from ingress NGINX, because each controller interprets annotations differently. Traefik built a specific NGINX Provider that translates ingress NGINX annotations into Traefik configuration at runtime, meaning teams can swap the controller without modifying a single Ingress resource.
The company claims coverage of more than 90 percent of annotations actively used in real migrations, a figure it arrived at by instrumenting migration tooling and analysing actual annotation usage patterns rather than attempting to support every annotation in the specification.
The vendor quotes collected in the announcement reflect the range of use cases these platforms cover. Nutanix’s Dan Ciruli noted that K3s has used Traefik as its default ingress controller for years, and that the retirement “validates the decision we made years ago.”
SUSE’s Peter Smails confirmed that Traefik will become the default in RKE2 starting with v1.36, replacing ingress NGINX as the distribution default. OVHcloud’s Jacques Murez positioned the choice around Gateway API readiness. TIBCO’s Devu Heda described Traefik as already powering ingress for both customer deployments and TIBCO’s own SaaS control plane infrastructure.
This last point matters for how Traefik Labs frames its commercial opportunity. The company’s open source product, Traefik Proxy, is MIT-licensed and accounts for the migration wave being announced today. But Traefik Labs is also selling Traefik Hub, an enterprise platform that adds API Gateway, AI Gateway, MCP Gateway, and API lifecycle management on top of Traefik Proxy, deployable via a single Helm chart upgrade.
The ingress NGINX retirement is, from the company’s perspective, not just a migration event but an entry point: engineering teams that are already updating their networking layer are positioned to evaluate whether to extend that investment into API management.
Traefik Proxy has 3.4 billion Docker Hub downloads and 62,000 GitHub stars, making it one of the most widely deployed open source networking projects in cloud-native infrastructure. Traefik Labs was founded in 2016 by Emile Vauge, who now serves as CTO, with Sudeep Goswami appointed CEO in February 2024.
The company is headquartered in both France and the United States. It has raised $11.1 million across two funding rounds, with Balderton Capital, Kima Ventures, and Elaia among its backers, a relatively modest capital base for a company whose open source software sits in front of a substantial fraction of the world’s containerised production workloads.
