Announcing Nginx Gateway Fabric 2.2

Announcements
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Hi All.

We are delighted to announce NGINX Gateway Fabric (NGF) 2.2, a release focused on advancing Kubernetes application delivery for modern LLM inference workloads, deepening OpenShift integration, and expanding flexibility in traffic management.

This version marks an important milestone. The addition of the Gateway API Inference Extension significantly advances how Kubernetes platforms route and balance GenAI and LLM inference traffic in a native and observable way.

Key highlights of this release

  • Gateway API Inference Extension: Running AI inference at scale presents challenges that traditional routing struggles to solve. NGF 2.2 includes full support for the Gateway API Inference Extension, which introduces inference-aware, Kubernetes-native routing. This feature empowers platform and ML teams to expose self-hosted GenAI and LLM services on Kubernetes with smarter, inference-aware routing and improved control over how workloads consume GPU and compute resources.

  • Regular Expression Path Matching: NGF 2.2 introduces full regular expression matching for routes at the HTTPRoute level. This enhancement allows application teams to design routing rules with far greater flexibility and precision, making it easier to manage complex, dynamic paths in large environments. The NGINX community played a major role in shaping this capability, and we appreciate every contribution that helped bring it to life.

  • OpenShift Certification – pending: OpenShift certification for NGF 2.2 will be completed in the coming days, once the operator packages are available and the process with Red Hat is finalized. NGF 2.2 already includes UBI-compliant container images and packaging that meet Red Hat standards. It also supports OpenShift’s latest Gateway API implementation, enabling smooth ingress and traffic management on OpenShift 4.19+. After certification is complete, NGF will appear in the OperatorHub catalog for easy discovery and installation.

  • ExternalName Services supported: NGF 2.2 adds support for routing to ExternalName services. This allows users to connect Gateway-managed routes directly to external services such as third-party APIs, external cloud components, or other services outside of the Kubernetes cluster. Administrators can also define a custom DNS resolver per ExternalName service for each Gateway, enabling precise handling of external traffic resolution.

  • Ingress2Gateway Provider and Migration Tool: To make the migration from the NGINX Ingress Controller (NIC) to NGF seamless, the team recently released the Ingress2Gateway provider. This tool allows users to take their existing Ingress resources and automatically convert them into Gateway API resources. The Ingress2Gateway tool understands a wide range of NGINX-specific annotations and preserves behavior during the conversion, ensuring a consistent and accurate transition to NGF. The team is also working on making this conversion compatible with our popular Custom Resource Definitions in the Ingress Controller, such as VirtualServer and VirtualServerRoute.

  • Gateway Addresses and Port-specific ParentReferences: Operators can now define external addresses directly in the Gateway.spec.addresses field, specifying IP addresses, hostnames, or other address types that Gateways should bind to. This provides more explicit control over where incoming traffic enters the cluster. NGF 2.2 also introduces port-specific ParentReferences, allowing routes to target a specific listener port on a Gateway and simplifying multi-port configurations.

Other Notable Features and Enhancements

  • Added support for the enforce_initial_report field in NGINX Plus.

  • Updated to the latest version of NGINX Agent.

  • Enhanced BackendTLSPolicy to include updated certificate validation rules from the Gateway API.

  • Added validation and error handling for unsupported fields in various resources (e.g., Gateway, HTTPRoute, GRPCRoute) to reflect NGF limitations.

Looking ahead
The next release of NGF will focus on highly requested capabilities, including enhanced security, more granular load balancing configuration, and extensions that go beyond basic routing in Kubernetes. These updates will further NGF’s evolution into a production-ready, enterprise platform for modern Kubernetes deployments.NGF keeps pace with the Gateway API specification and provides a solid foundation for experimentation and feedback. Our team is closely tracking the spec’s evolution and will continue refining implementation details as the standard matures.

A thank-you to the NGINX community
We extend our gratitude to the NGINX community for your ongoing feedback and collaboration. Your support and insight drive NGF’s continuous improvement.

Please check out the Github release page as well as our public release docs to see everything that has changed, including resolved issues.

Best Regards,
Micheal

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