CNCF recently announced that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Istio as a CNCF Incubation Project.

Istio is an open source service mesh that transparently provides a unified and efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services in cloud-native applications. Istio includes features such as zero-trust networking, policy enforcement, traffic management, load balancing, and monitoring without requiring developers to rewrite their applications.

Development of Istio began in 2016, initially by Google and IBM, along with the Lyft team that built the Envoy proxy. Significant contributions since then have come from:

• Technology companies and cloud vendors, including Red Hat, Cisco, VMware, Intel, Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, and DaoCloud
• Companies founded to bring Istio solutions to market including Tetrate, Aspen Mesh and Solo.io
• Istio’s end users including Auto Trader UK, Salesforce, SAP and Yahoo!

Istio is built on many CNCF projects such as Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, Prometheus, and SPIFFE. It can be installed via Helm and integrates with projects including Knative, Flagger, Jaeger, Open Policy Agent and OpenTelemetry.

Important milestones for Istio:

• A total of 85 maintainers from 15 companies
• Over 8,800 individual contributors
• Over 40,000 PRs
• Over 20,000 issues
• More than 260 releases
• Over 33,000 GitHub stars
• Slack has over 8,500 members

Further reading