Ingress-nginx replacement - InGate

[jfavellar90]

As announced in the ingress-nginx repo, ingress-nginx is going to be replaced by the InGate project. We need to track this progress and apply the changes on the Harmony Chart accordingly

[MoisesGSalas]

A little update on this issue: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/11/11/ingress-nginx-retirement/

Ingress nginx is being retired starting march next year.

[uhlhosting]

@jfavellar90

I would recommend plugging into the GatewayAPI directly!

[jfavellar90]

The plan is to find time early next year (the first 2 or 3 weeks) to conduct a discovery about the options we have for the ingress-nginx migration. Then, we'll have the arguments to make a decision and implement the approach in Harmony

[MoisesGSalas]

I opened #179 to propose Traefik as a replacement. I had a few notes when doing a small discovery that I can leave here:

---

Traefik

Traefik is an HTTP reverse proxy with direct integration to docker, swarm and Kubernetes. In particular, it includes an implementation of both, 'Ingress' objects, 'GatewayAPI' objects as well as their own custom resource 'IngressRoute' out of the box.

Installing Traefik

Traefik provides an official helm chart either via their official Helm repository (https://traefik.github.io/charts) or through an OCI artifact (oci://ghcr.io/traefik/helm/traefik).

Compatibility and additional features

The ingress object API provides a standard specification that grants compatibility between implementations. This holds true for the most part, but each ingress controller implementation provides custom behaviour through the use of annotations.

The Traefik ingress controller provides a compatibility layer with Ingress NGINX which covers a subset of its features and it's aimed to ease the transition process. When enabled, the compatibility layer will read the ingress objects using the ingressClass associated with the Ingress NGINX controller and register them as routes in the Traefik controller, taking into account the supported annotations. The list of supported annotations can be found in: https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/reference/routing-configuration/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/#annotations-support

Although a good portion of annotations are supported out of the box, clusters that make heavy use of the server-snippet annotation would need to face an important rewrite of their current configuration using a mixture of Traefik's custom resources and annotations.

Traefik includes addional Custom Resources that provide additional features such as: exposing TCP and UDP endpoints, configuration of Traefik's middlewares for advanced routing.

The Traefik controller also supports the latest GatewayAPI specification providing a possible migration path from ingress based routing to GatewayAPI routing. Enabling GatewayAPI support consists on mostly reconfiguring the values in the helm chart used to deploy Traefik.

Observability

Traefik has support for the Prometheus Operator and provides the Service Monitor custom resources in the official helm chart. Additionally, Traefik has support for Open Telemetry and can export metrics to an Open Telemetry collector.