Announcing Istio 1.0

Istio is ready for production use with its 1.0 release.

Jul 31, 2018

Today, we’re excited to announce Istio 1.0! It’s been a little over a year since our initial 0.1 release. Since then, Istio has evolved significantly with the help of a thriving and growing community of contributors and users. We’ve now reached the point where many companies have successfully adopted Istio in production and have gotten real value from the insight and control it provides over their deployments. We’ve helped large enterprises and fast-moving startups like eBay, Auto Trader UK, Descartes Labs, HP FitStation, JUSPAY, Namely, PubNub and Trulia use Istio to connect, manage and secure their services from the ground up. Shipping this release as 1.0 is recognition that we’ve built a core set of functionality that our users can rely on for production use.

Ecosystem

We’ve seen substantial growth in Istio’s ecosystem in the last year. Envoy continues its impressive growth and added numerous features that are crucial for a production quality service mesh. Observability providers like Datadog, SolarWinds, Sysdig, Google Stackdriver and Amazon CloudWatch have written plugins to integrate Istio with their products. Tigera, Aporeto, Cilium and Styra built extensions to our policy enforcement and networking capabilities. Red Hat built Kiali to wrap a nice user-experience around mesh management and observability. Cloud Foundry is building on Istio for it’s next generation traffic routing stack, the recently announced Knative serverless project is doing the same and Apigee announced that they plan to use it in their API management solution. These are just some of the integrations the community has added in the last year.

Features

Since the 0.8 release we’ve added some important new features and more importantly marked many of our existing features as Beta signaling that they’re ready for production use. Here are some highlights:

What’s next?

While this is a significant milestone for the project there’s lots more to do. In working with adopters we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about what to focus next. We’ve heard consistent themes around support for hybrid-cloud, install modularity, richer networking features and scalability for massive deployments. We’ve already taken some of this feedback into account in the 1.0 release and we’ll continue to aggressively tackle this work in the coming months.

Getting started

If you’re new to Istio and looking to use it for your deployment we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at our docs or stop by our chat forum. If you’d like to go deeper and contribute to the project come to one of our community meetings and say hello.

Thanks

The Istio team would like to give huge thanks to everyone who has made a contribution to the project. It wouldn’t be where it is today without your help. The last year has been pretty amazing and we look forward to the next one with excitement about what we can achieve together as a community.

Release notes

Networking

Policy and telemetry

Adapters

Security

istioctl

Known issues with 1.0