With ingress-nginx entering feature freeze, the hunt for alternatives like Cilium with Gateway API or Traefik. However, migrating production workloads can be risky and tedious.

IssTech proposes a "Backup-as-Code" strategy using Veeam Kasten to solve this. By backing up your live NGINX application and restoring it to a test cluster, you can validate new controllers safely using real data.

The process leverages Kasten "Transform Sets" to modify data on the fly—automatically patching Ingress classes and stripping annotations, or excluding old configs entirely for a Gateway API migration. This approach turns backup software into a powerful migration engine, eliminating the need for manual manifest rewriting and protecting production environments.