Cilium 1.20, released on September 14, 2026, turns the Gateway API into a full traffic-management layer and finally closes the IPv6 gap in ENI mode on AWS. Teams migrating off ingress-nginx or extending their CNI now have a concrete reason to move.
On November 12, 2025, Kubernetes announced the retirement of ingress-nginx; upstream maintenance stopped in March 2026 and the last patch bridge, Microsoft’s for AKS, expires in November 2026. Every annotation in your fleet now has to become a Gateway API route — or remain an unpatched vulnerability.
TCPRoute and UDPRoute graduate to Standard channel in Gateway API v1.6, closing the last gap for databases, DNS, and VoIP on Kubernetes. The new XBackend resource and experimental API group separation reshape the cloud-native networking roadmap.
Gateway API v1.6, released on June 30, 2026, graduates TCPRoute and UDPRoute from experimental to Standard. Workloads speaking raw protocols — databases, DNS, VoIP, gaming — no longer need to bypass the Gateway with plain Kubernetes Services.
The ingress-nginx project ends all maintenance in March 2026. The GitHub repository has been archived since March 24, no further security patches will be published, and CVE-2025-1974 demonstrated the architectural risks of a controller built on arbitrary annotations. Gateway API is the mandatory migration target, and it’s ready.
