Stop fighting with Ingress: NGINX Gateway Fabric is now certified for Red Hat OpenShift

Platform engineering teams know the drill. You need to connect, secure, and route traffic to your applications on OpenShift. Sometimes, it can feel like you’re wrestling with limitations or complexity at scale when managing traditional Ingress.

Your platform deserves flexibility without giving up an ounce of control.

That’s why we’ve been working closely with F5, and we're happy to share that NGINX Gateway Fabric is now a certified operator for Red Hat OpenShift.

For the thousands of teams already running NGINX and Red Hat OpenShift, this is the optimization you've been waiting for. It brings one of the most popular data planes directly into your trusted OpenShift workflow. You get a high-performance, familiar tool that is now fully supported and validated as part of your enterprise platform, ready to manage everything from simple web apps to critical APIs.

Beyond Ingress: How the Gateway API and NGINX change the game

The move from Ingress to the Kubernetes Gateway API is more than a technical swap; it's a new, more powerful model for Kubernetes networking. Red Hat already provides a strong, native foundation for the Kubernetes Gateway API in OpenShift. This collaboration with NGINX builds on that foundation by bringing the new NGINX Gateway Fabric to Red Hat OpenShift, giving you a powerful choice.

For many organizations, this is an ideal solution that gives you:

• A trusted data plane: Teams can now run the NGINX data plane they already trust for its battle-tested performance, all managed natively within Red Hat OpenShift.
• Ecosystem consistency: It provides a consistent NGINX-powered experience from the edge to the cluster, allowing you to unify your tooling and policies—like advanced rate-limiting or WAF integration with NGINX App Protect—across your entire estate.

A shared model for speed and control

Both the native Kubernetes Gateway API in Red Hat OpenShift and NGINX Gateway Fabric implement the same role-based standard that cleanly separates platform-level concerns from application-level needs.

• For platform engineers: You can manage the "front door." This is your central point of control for gateways, listeners, and security policies, regardless of which underlying implementation you choose.
• For developers: Your teams can self-serve, defining how their specific application routes traffic (like path-based routing or header matching) using portable, Kubernetes-native resources. No more waiting for a ticket.

This clear separation of duties is core to the Red Hat OpenShift philosophy: give developers speed but never at the expense of platform security and control.

Unify your application and AI traffic

The story gets better. As enterprises push more AI/ML workloads into production on platforms like Red Hat OpenShift AI, managing the traffic for those models becomes a new challenge. This integration tackles that head-on by supporting the emerging Inference API Extension.

You can use the same proven NGINX fabric to manage, secure, and scale your AI endpoints right alongside your traditional applications. It brings AI-aware load balancing and modern routing directly into your existing Kubernetes framework, simplifying your entire stack.

Get it in the catalog

Adding NGINX Gateway Fabric to your stack isn't about replacing what works. It's about enhancing it. It’s about giving your teams a trusted, high-performance, and unified way to manage traffic for everything you run on Red Hat OpenShift, from your legacy apps to your next gen AI model.

Ready to stop wrestling with network policies and start building?

Explore the certified NGINX Gateway Fabric operator in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog!