Hi All.
It has been an eventful few weeks since the Kubernetes community announced at KubeCon North America 2025 that the community-maintained ingress-nginx project will be retired in March 2026. While ingress‑nginx is separate from our projects, many users are now evaluating alternatives. The good news is that NGINX Ingress Controller (NIC) has a clear long-term roadmap. Many users are already asking about their options, and we’re here to help. Read more in our blog.
That said, we’re pleased to announce F5 NGINX Ingress Controller 5.3.0. This release focuses on improving existing capabilities, delivering key requested features, and making migration from ingress-nginx easier.
Key highlights of this release
Expanded NGINX Cache CRD: Based on strong feedback from some of our key users, we’ve added support for most caching directives, enabling powerful, production grade caching with F5 NGINX Ingress Controller.
Cross namespace support for VirtualServer: You can now route from a VirtualServer to services in different Kubernetes namespaces. This simplifies multi-tenant operations and reduces the coupling and maintenance overhead previously required across VirtualServer and VirtualServerRoute resources.
Helm chart HPA enhancements: We’ve added HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) resources to the Helm chart, enabling external HPA management (for example, with Kubernetes Event Driven Autoscaling) and extending HPA support to StatefulSet deployments.
Last, but certainly not least, migration support for ingress-nginx. We’ve added support for several popular ingress-nginx annotations, to help users migrate to NGINX Ingress Controller, with more to come in future releases:
- nginx.org/client-body-buffer-size: mirrors nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/client-body-buffer-size (sets the maximum size of the client request body buffer). Also available in VirtualServer and config map.
- nginx.org/rewrite-target: mirrors nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target (sets a replacement path for URI rewrites)
- nginx.org/ssl-ciphers: mirrors nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-ciphers (configures enabled TLS cipher suites)
- nginx.org/ssl-prefer-server-cipher: mirrors nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-prefer-server-ciphers (controls server side cipher preference during the TLS handshake)
Other Notable Features and Enhancements
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Upgraded to the latest versions of NGINX, WAF (for Plus users), and Agent
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Updated Alpine base to 3.22 for NIC images
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Stability improvements: Added startup logic to clean up .sock files when they aren’t removed properly, improving recovery after unexpected termination (thank you @sigv in our NGINX community for the suggestion)
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Updated dependencies and packages to ensure all images are FIP’s compliant and CVE tested, giving userd confidence that they are running secure and tested images.
Please check out the Github release page as well as our public release docs to see everything that has changed, including resolved issues.
Thank you to the engineering team for your hard work, and congratulations on another successful release!
Best Regards,
Micheal