We’re in the process of upgrading the Nginx Ingress Controller from the legacy v0.51.0 version to mainline v1.2.1. This is in preparation for the AKS and EKS upgrades to Kubernetes 1.22 which is following in the coming weeks.
All non-production clusters are already using the newest Ingress Controller version, and the remaining clusters will be upgraded by Tuesday 21/06. There is no impact expected for your application workloads.
An Ingress Controller is responsible for exposing your application services outside K8s, like to the public internet (ingressClassName: nginx) or the internal VPC (ingressClassName: nginx-internal).
Meanwhile we’d also sent out another reminder to check and update your deprecated API versions for Ingress and RBAC, check out the relevant changelog post for details.
Also take note that specifiying an Ingress Class via the kubernetes.io/ingress.class annotation is deprecated and can be removed later. Instead you should specify spec.ingressClassName in your Ingress resources.