Istio Project Announces 2026 Steering Committee

Announcing the results of our Community Seat election and our Contribution Seat holders.

Mar 27, 2026 | By Ram Vennam, for the Istio Steering Committee

The Istio Steering Committee oversees the administrative aspects of the project, including governance, branding, marketing, and working with the CNCF.

Every year, we estimate the proportion of the hundreds of companies that have contributed to Istio in the past year, and use that metric to proportionally allocate the nine Contribution Seats on our Steering Committee.

After that, four Community Seats are voted for by our project members, with candidates being from companies that did not receive Contribution Seats.

In February, we announced the Contribution Seat allocation, and invited candidates to stand for the Community Seat elections. As the election officer, I am pleased to announce the results of that election, as well as the individuals who will represent the top contributors.

Community Seats

Five candidates stood for our four open seats. Using Condorcet-method ranked voting, the following four candidates have been elected:

We’re excited to welcome this fantastic group of community leaders. Faseela is returning for her fourth term on Steering and also serves on the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee. Craig has been on the Steering Committee since 2020 and recently ended his term as the maintainer representative on the CNCF Governing Board. Tyler is a new face on Steering, bringing an end-user perspective from GEICO Tech, where he leads a team building a custom service mesh on Istio. Zhonghu has been an Istio contributor since the project’s early days, is a core maintainer in multiple working groups, and is transitioning this year from a Contribution Seat to a Community Seat.

Contribution Seats

Our supporting companies have made their choices for the nine Contribution Seats. They will be held by:

Seating the new committee

On behalf of the Steering Committee, I wish to congratulate our new and returning members. This group will serve for one year, starting this week.

We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Idit Levine, Rob Scott, Pratima Nambiar, and Wilson Wu, whose terms have now ended.

The new team will continue to grow and improve Istio as a successful and sustainable open source project. We encourage everyone to get involved in the Istio community, and help us shape the future of the world’s most popular service mesh.

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