Move away from nginx-ingress-controller

[jfaltermeier]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The Nginx Ingress Controller will be retired in March 2026
https://www.kubernetes.dev/blog/2025/11/12/ingress-nginx-retirement/

Describe the solution you'd like

We should switch to a different ingress controller, preferably one that works across a wide variety of popular hosting services and with Minikube on all platforms (for local development and e2e tests).

In the long run, we might also consider looking into the Gateway API.

Maybe we can use the Kong Ingress as a transition from Ingress to Gatway.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Cluster provider

No response

Additional information

No response

[harmen-xb]

Within our solution we run Theia Cloud on the Hetzner Cloud platform. Using a k3s setup there are three Ingress controllers which are supported by default: Traefik, Nginx or HAProxy. So maybe Traefik & HAProxy can also be considered.

Ideally it would be setup in such a way that multiple ingress controllers are supported, if possible.

[jfaltermeier]

Thanks for the input. The plan is to continue supporting nginx while allowing other ingress controllers and providing a new default.
I had a first look at the available options, and HAProxy seems closest to nginx in terms of configuration, so this might be a good option to try first.

[jkassel]

looking for cilium ingress support.