AWS EKS And The Great Ingress-Nginx Deprecation Of 2026

In March of 2026, the long-time staple of Kubernetes ingress controllers, ingress-nginx, will stop receiving security patches and regular updates. For many Kubernetes operators, this is a forcing function for us to migrate to a new solution that supports the newer Gateway API. The ecosystem of solutions in this space is large and complex, and operators find themselves weighing a myriad of options. In this talk, I hope to answer many questions that we have had to answer in this space, such as:

• What are the advantages of Gateway API over the Ingress API?
• Which Gateway API Solution should you use for different scenarios
• Why not simply migrate to another ingress controller?
• Where does the AWS Load Balancer Controller fit in this new ecosystem?
• What does support for WAF, ALB, NLB, etc. look like going forward?

Timeline:
6:00 PM - Doors Open. Please be prepared to show ID that matches your registration.
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM - Speaker
7:30 PM - 8:00 PM - Networking
8:00 PM - Event ends. Conversation continues at Highline for anyone interested.