Gateway API migration guide
VMware published a step‑by‑step migration guide for moving from Ingress NGINX to Gateway API with Istio, signaling a broader industry shift toward policy-driven gateways that better support security and observability. The guide is already being cited as the playbook for teams modernizing Kubernetes ingress to handle higher-security and AI traffic patterns (blogs.vmware.com).
VMware’s load‑balancing team published an Avi Conversion Tool (ACT) to automate translation of NGINX Ingress resources and annotations into Avi Gateway API configurations for VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) customers. (blogs.vmware.com) VMware has published an Istio on VKS walkthrough (March 6, 2025) that documents Istio installation and operational patterns on VKS clusters referenced by the migration scenarios. (blogs.vmware.com) The Kubernetes project released ingress2gateway (Ingress2Gateway) 1.0 on March 20, 2026 as an official tool to convert Ingress manifests into Gateway API HTTPRoute/Gateway objects, reducing manual mapping effort. (kubernetes.io) The Gateway API maintainers explicitly recommend running a Gateway API controller side‑by‑side with an existing Ingress‑NGINX controller (each on a different external IP) to validate traffic and enable safe cutovers. (gateway-api.sigs.k8s.io) Istio announced new beta features—an ambient multicluster capability and a Gateway API Inference Extension—at the end of March 2026 to add first‑class support for inference/AI traffic patterns and multicluster ingress use cases. (cncf.io) Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee set March 2026 as the end of best‑effort maintenance for the community ingress‑nginx project, and independent migration reports show ingress‑to‑gateway conversion tooling and side‑by‑side deployments can cover roughly 80–90% of config translation and enable zero‑downtime DNS cutovers. (kubernetes.dev)
