Introducing N42 Gateway

Joao Morais

Today I am announcing an important change on my ingress controller project: HAProxy Ingress is becoming N42 Gateway.

This is a naming and branding change only. The project itself continues with the same principles, the same goals, and the same commitment to performance, reliability, and open source collaboration.

Why the rename?

Over time, the existing project name has caused recurring confusion between this project and the commercial products and offerings from HAProxy Technologies.

While HAProxy Ingress has always been an independent open source project built around HAProxy as its routing engine, the similarity in naming has understandably led users to assume official affiliation, shared support channels, or product equivalence.

To reduce ambiguity and make the project’s identity clearer moving forward, I decided to adopt a new name.

Why “N42 Gateway”?

N42 is a reference to a common industrial grade of neodymium magnets, widely used in high-performance motors, precision electronics, and advanced engineering systems.

The name reflects the project’s focus on efficiency, throughput, resilience, and strong traffic orchestration under demanding workloads.

It is also a subtle nod to engineering and hacker culture — a small reference many science fiction fans will probably recognize.

What changes?

The project will continue evolving from the same codebase and architecture currently used by HAProxy Ingress.

The following remain unchanged:

  • HAProxy as the routing and proxy engine
  • Existing project goals and technical direction
  • Community-driven development model
  • Long-term support and maintenance commitment
  • Focus on Kubernetes-native high-performance ingress and gateway capabilities

However, some project assets will be renamed as part of the transition:

  • Git repository name
  • Container image URLs
  • Helm chart repository and chart names
  • Documentation references and installation examples

Migration and compatibility

I understand that naming transitions can create operational friction, especially in production Kubernetes environments.

To minimize impact, I will publish a detailed migration guide covering:

  • Repository migration details
  • Updated image locations
  • Helm migration steps
  • Compatibility considerations
  • Recommended upgrade paths

Our goal is to make the transition as predictable and low-friction as possible for existing users.

A note on HAProxy

HAProxy® remains at the core of the project and continues to be the high-performance engine powering N42 Gateway.

This rename does not represent a departure from HAProxy. On the contrary, the project continues building on top of the reliability, performance, and maturity that HAProxy provides.

Looking ahead

The rename to N42 Gateway gives the project a clearer identity while preserving everything that existing users already rely on.

I am excited about this next chapter and grateful to everyone who has contributed feedback, code, documentation, bug reports, and operational experience throughout the years.

As part of this transition, we are also opening a community survey to better understand how the project is being used today, what kinds of environments and workloads it supports, what users expect moving forward, and where we can improve. Whether your feedback is positive, critical, operational, strategic, or migration-related, it is genuinely valuable and will help shape the next phase of N42 Gateway. If you have a few minutes to spare, we would greatly appreciate your participation: https://forms.gle/DG6UZiYCHnmjux2w5

Thank you for being part of the project.