# Kubernetes Ingress NGINX

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Kubernetes Ingress NGINX and 16 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Stable, flexible Kubernetes ingress controller that people say just worked and ran in production. Critics note it is being retired, with maintainership shortfalls and recent critical vulnerabilities.

## Why people recommend it

- Stable and reliable in production (3 comments): "Its open source, it's super stable, your shit's not going to die tomorrow or ever." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928372)) "it was an extraordinarily useful and reliable project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923330)) "It just worked and was stable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924342))
- Flexible, supports many annotations (2 comments): "Nginx Ingress Controller worked around that by supporting a ton of annotations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45930962)) "works so well, is so flexible, and does not have an equal yet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923507))

## What people warn about

- Being retired, no longer maintained (5 comments): "And it happens while we are all very enthusiastically dedicated to migrating off Kubernetes ingress-nginx. Just as planned." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223390)) "the nginx ingress controller is now deprecated, so you have to choose from a handful of alternatives" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147294)) "the killing of the nginx ingress was the nail in the coffin" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549485))
- Under-maintained by too few people (4 comments): "popular project probably used by many megacorps only propped up by the weekend charity of a couple unpaid suckers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45923757)) "The maintainer had plenty of people who wanted to help, but never spent the time to teach them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924507)) "Ingress NGINX has always struggled with insufficient or barely-sufficient maintainership" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926096))
- Critical security vulnerabilities (2 comments): "Exploiting this flaw allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code and access all cluster secrets across namespaces" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120289)) "There have been critical vulns in nginx-ingress (the part which is deprecated)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47933878))
- Alternatives considered better (2 comments): "multiple full featured Ingress implementations that work better than the old nginx-ingress" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925058)) "Worst than nginx ingress controller" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46104461))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Traefik](https://hackerapproved.com/p/traefik.md): 27 recommend
- [Envoy Proxy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/envoy.md): 14 recommend
- [Tailscale Serve](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tailscale-serve.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Kubernetes Ingress NGINX", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ingress-nginx/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).