Kubernetes 1.36: The Release That Said Goodbye to Ingress NGINX
Introduction Tomorrow, April 22, 2026, Kubernetes 1.36 will be officially released. As a team leader working in security, part of my job is reading release notes to understand what is coming and, more importantly, to track the direction the developers are moving in. Some releases are routine progress; others signal a shift in priorities. This is one of those. Kubernetes 1.36 will be remembered as the release that formalized the end of Ingress NGINX. That alone would make it memorable; Ingress NGINX is too big and too deeply embedded in the ecosystem to ignore, and I will dedicate a section to it. But the focus of this post is security: alongside the NGINX retirement, 1.36 delivers meaningful hardening through the graduation of faster SELinux volume labeling to GA, the stable release of external ServiceAccount token signing, and the permanent removal of features that have been known security liabilities for years. ...