Following the deprecation
of ingress‑nginx, Kubernetes operators need a supported, standards‑aligned
migration path for ingress without the complexity of a full service mesh.
Application Routing with Meshless Istio enables adoption of the Kubernetes
Gateway API for ingress management while avoiding sidecar‑based architectures,
and Microsoft is extending support for existing ingress‑nginx‑based Application
Routing while contributing to the open‑source ingress2gateway project. This
allows teams to modernize ingress configurations incrementally, maintain
operational continuity, and align with evolving Kubernetes standards.