The status of the controller
As of March 2026, the Kubernetes SIG Network stopped maintaining ingress-nginx. That is the controller a lot of clusters have been running for years. A CNCF blog post published July 9 walks operators through the state of play. The headline for anyone still on it is short: unpatched CVEs, and no more feature work.
The post names two operational risks explicitly. New security issues will not receive upstream fixes. Feature updates and community support have stopped. If your ingress plane is a piece of infrastructure you have not touched in a while, this is the reason to pull it up in this quarter's planning doc.
What it means at 3am
An ingress controller sits between the internet and your services. When it drops a request, you find out from your users. When it takes a CVE and no one is patching, you find out from a scanner or from a report. Neither is a good discovery path.
