The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the graduation of Istio. Istio is an open source service mesh that provides a uniform and efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services in cloud native applications.
Istio provides zero-trust networking, policy enforcement, traffic management, load balancing, and monitoring without requiring applications to be rewritten. It pioneered the modern service mesh pattern — security, traffic routing and observability using sidecar containers — when it launched in 2017. In 2022, the project continued to drive innovation in the space by introducing a complementary architecture, ambient mesh — offering the same benefits without needing sidecars.
“Today, the Istio project takes its place alongside the projects that enable it and upon which it is built, including Kubernetes, Envoy, Prometheus, and SPIFFE,” said Craig Box, Istio Steering Committee member and VP of Open Source and Community at ARMO. “On behalf of the project’s leadership, we wish to thank every contributor, both corporate and individual, who have collectively brought us to graduation within the CNCF.”
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Istio was initially developed by Google and IBM and built on the Envoy project from Lyft. The project now has maintainers from more than 16 companies, including many of the largest networking vendors and cloud organizations worldwide. End users range from digital native startups to the world’s largest financial institutions and telcos, with case studies from companies including eBay, T-Mobile, Airbnb and Salesforce.com. Istio is the third most active CNCF project in terms of the number of PRs opened and merged.
This year, the Istio community welcomed the maintainers of the Open Service Mesh project, with the team from Microsoft becoming Istio contributors. The combined group continues to drive the development of the Kubernetes Gateway API, which traces its lineage directly to Istio’s traffic management model.
The inaugural Istio Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, the first Istio event arranged by CNCF, was the second best attended of all the co-located events. As a result, the program will be a full-day event on November 6th during the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023. The CFP is open through August 6, 2023.
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The two IstioCon events have attracted an audience of more than 4,000 end users, developers and maintainers. A third annual IstioCon will be hosted by CNCF on the 25th and 26th of September, 2023. A full day of in-person content in Chinese will be offered alongside KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China in Shanghai, with two days of virtual content in English for the worldwide Istio audience. The CFP is open for sessions in Chinese and English through July 23, 2023.
“Service mesh adoption has been steadily rising over the past few years as cloud native adoption has matured across industries,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Istio has helped drive part of this maturation, and the project has progressed quickly since joining CNCF late last year. We look forward to watching and supporting this continued growth as the Istio team adds new features and simplifies the service mesh experience.”
As a CNCF graduated project, Istio joins the ranks of respected technologies that have proven their value and viability in the cloud native ecosystem. Graduation validates Istio’s commitment to openness, collaboration, and innovation.
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