What Are the Best Alternatives to Ingress-NGINX and How Can We Benchmark Them?

If you're looking for an easy alternative, definitely consider using the Traefik migration tool. It's currently one of the simplest options available for transitioning away from ingress-nginx.

You might want to check out this GitHub repo for some benchmarks on the Gateway API. It could give you some valuable insights: github.com/howardjohn/gateway-api-bench.

Honestly, when it comes to performance, it really isn't as critical as some might think. If you have a good load balancer set up and can scale, the reverse proxy's performance becomes secondary. You should be focusing more on features and maturity when considering options like HAProxy, Traefik, or others.

When I first read your post, I wondered if ingress was really going away with NGINX's move. After some reading, it looks like migrating to Traefik is an excellent route! I have a Kubernetes setup that's a bit old—around 500 days—and I skipped NGINX because I preferred Traefik from the start. I think moving towards the Gateway API is the next step for me!

What do you mean by 'benchmark'? Typically, that points to some kind of performance comparison. There are a lot of those out there, but many of them have their biases or optimize for one vendor over another. The real value comes from a benchmark tailored to your specific configuration and workload. If you want something personalized, you might need to invest in a paid service and factor in the expertise of the team doing the benchmarking. Also, I noticed you're asking about free versus paid options—just a thought!