Istio 1.19.0 Change Notes

Istio 1.19.0 change notes.

Sep 5, 2023

Deprecation Notices

These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

Artifacts

The macOS and Windows artifacts without an architecture specified in the name (ex: istio-1.18.0-osx.tar.gz). They will be removed in several releases. They have been replaced by artifacts containing the architecture in the name (ex: istio-1.18.0-osx-amd64.tar.gz). (Issue #45677)

Traffic Management

Improved JWT claim based routing to support using [] as a separator for nested claim names. (Issue #44228)
Improved performance of sidecar injection, in particular with pods with a large number of environment variables.
Updated DNS resolution when using ServiceEntries so that DNS for multi-network gateways will be resolved at the proxy instead of in the control plane.
Added support for traffic.sidecar.istio.io/excludeInterfaces annotation in proxy. (Issue #41271)
Added initial ambient support for WorkloadEntry. (Issue #45472)
Added ambient support for WorkloadEntry resources without an address. (Issue #45758)
Added initial ambient support for ServiceEntry.
Added support for regex rewrite in VirtualService HTTPRewrite. (Issue #22290)
Added a new TLS mode OPTIONAL_MUTUAL in ServerTLSSettings of Gateway that will validate client certificate if presented.
Added enhancement for Dual Stack to set up the correct DNS family type. CheckIPFamilyTypeForFirstIPs has been added to help confirm the IP family type based on the first IP address. Changed the ISTIO_DUAL_STACK environment variable to be uniform the for both control and data plane. (Issue #41462)
Fixed WorkloadEntry resources on different networks to not require an address to be specified. (Issue #45150)
Fixed Istio’s Gateway API implementation to adhere to the Gateway API requirement that a group: "" field must be set for a parentRef of kind: Service. Istio previously tolerated the missing group for Service-kind parent references. This is a breaking change; see the upgrade notes for details. (Issue #2309)
Fixed configuring istio.alpn filter for non-Istio mTLS. (Issue #40680)
Fixed the bug where patching http_route affects other virtualhosts. (Issue #44820)
Fixed EnvoyFilter operation orders so that deleted and re-added resources don’t get deleted. (Issue #45089)
Fixed VirtualMachine WorkloadEntry auto register failing with invalid istio-locality label when user specified istio-locality in ./etc/istio/pod/labels. (Issue #45413)
Fixed an issue in dual stack meshes where virtualHost.Domains was missing the second IP address from dual stack services. (Issue #45557)
Fixed a bug where route configuration is rejected with duplicate domains when VirtualService has the same hosts with different case. (Issue #45719)
Fixed an issue where Istiod might crash when a cluster is deleted if the xDS cache is disabled. (Issue #45798)
Fixed creating istioin and istioout geneve links on nodes which already have configured an external geneve link or another geneve link for the same VNI and remote IP. To avoid getting errors in these cases, istio-cni dynamically determines available destination ports for created geneve links.
Fixed an issue where Istiod can’t auto-detect the service port change when the service is referred to by ingress using service port name. (Issue #46035)
Fixed an issue where HTTP probe’s request.host was not well propagated. (Issue #46087)
Fixed ambient WorkloadEntry xDS events to fire on updates to spec. (Issue #46267)
Fixed health_checkers EnvoyFilter extensions not being compiled into the proxy. (Issue #46277)
Fixed crash when LoadBalancer.Ingress.IP was not present or was unset to not include empty IP strings in VIPs.
Fixed regression in HTTPGet healthcheck probe translation. (Issue #45632)
Removed the CNI_ENABLE_INSTALL, CNI_ENABLE_REINSTALL, SKIP_CNI_BINARIES, and UPDATE_CNI_BINARIES feature flags.
Removed the support for deprecated EnvoyFilter names in Envoy API name matches. EnvoyFilter will only be matched with canonical naming standard. See the Envoy documentation for more details.
Removed the ISTIO_DEFAULT_REQUEST_TIMEOUT feature flag. Please use timeout in VirtualService API.
Removed the ENABLE_AUTO_MTLS_CHECK_POLICIES feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_LEGACY_AUTO_PASSTHROUGH feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_LEGACY_ISTIO_MUTUAL_CREDENTIAL_NAME feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_LEGACY_INGRESS_BEHAVIOR feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_ISTIO_TAGS feature flag.
Removed the ENABLE_LEGACY_LB_ALGORITHM_DEFAULT feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_PARTIAL_FULL_PUSHES feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_INBOUND_PROTOCOL_DETECTION_TIMEOUT feature flag. This can be configured in MeshConfig if needed.
Removed the AUTO_RELOAD_PLUGIN_CERTS feature flag.
Removed the PRIORITIZED_LEADER_ELECTION feature flag.
Removed the SIDECAR_IGNORE_PORT_IN_HOST_MATCH feature flag.
Removed the REWRITE_TCP_PROBES feature flag.
Removed support for xDS v2 types in EnvoyFilters. These should use the v3 interface. This has been a warning for multiple releases and is now upgraded to an error.
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_PROTOCOL_SNIFFING_FOR_OUTBOUND and PILOT_ENABLE_PROTOCOL_SNIFFING_FOR_INBOUND feature flags. These have been enabled by default since Istio 1.5.
Removed support for looking up Envoy extensions in EnvoyFilter configuration by name without the typed config URL.
Optimized EnvoyFilter index generation to avoid rebuilding all EnvoyFilters every time one has changed, instead only rebuilding the changed EnvoyFilter and updating it in place.

Security

Added insecureSkipVerify implementation from DestinationRule. Setting insecureSkipVerify to true will disable CA certificate and Subject Alternative Names verification for the host. (Issue #33472)
Added support for PeerAuthentication policies in ambient. (Issue #42696)
Added cipher_suites support for non ISTIO_MUTUAL traffic through MeshConfig API. (Issue #28996)
Added Certificate Revocation List (CRL) support for peer certificate validation.
Added support for a flag called USE_EXTERNAL_WORKLOAD_SDS. When set to true, it will require an external SDS workload socket and it will prevent the istio-proxy from starting if the workload SDS socket is not found. (Issue #45534)
Fixed an issue where jwk issuer was not resolved correctly when having a trailing slash in the issuer URL. (Issue #45546)
Removed the SPIFFE_BUNDLE_ENDPOINTS feature flag.

Telemetry

Added new metric named provider_lookup_cluster_failures for lookup cluster failures.
Added support for K8s controller queue metrics, enabled by setting env variable ISTIO_ENABLE_CONTROLLER_QUEUE_METRICS to true. (Issue #44985)
Added a flag to disable OTel builtin resource labels.
Added cluster label for remote_cluster_sync_timeouts_total metric. (Issue #44489)
Added support for annotation sidecar.istio.io/statsHistogramBuckets to customize the histogram buckets in the proxy.
Added HTTP metadata exchange filter to support a fallback to xDS workload metadata discovery in addition to the metadata HTTP headers. The discovery method is off by default.
Added an option to configure Envoy to report load stats to the Load Reporting Service (LRS) server.
Fixed an issue where disabling a log provider through Istio telemetry API would not work.
Fixed an issue where Telemetry would not be fully disabled unless match.metric=ALL_METRICS was explicitly specified; matching all metrics is now correctly considered as the default.

Extensibility

Added an option to fail open on fetch failure and VM fatal errors.

Installation

Improved usage on OpenShift clusters by removing the need to manually create a NetworkAttachmentDefinition resource in every application namespace.
Updated Kiali addon to version v1.72.0.
Added support for PodDisruptionBudget (PDB) in the Gateway chart. (Issue #44469)
Added the Helm value of setting CNI ambient configDir path. (Issue #45400)
Added amd64 named artifacts for macOS and Windows. The amd64 flavor of the artifacts did not contain the architecture in the name as we do for the other operating systems. This makes the artifact naming consistent.
Added rollingUpdate maxUnavailable setting to the CNI deployment Helm chart to speed up deployments.
Added an automatically set GOMEMLIMIT and GOMAXPROCS to all deployments to improve performance.
Added configurable scaling behavior for Istiod’s HPA in Helm chart (usage). (Issue #42634)
Added values to the Istio Pilot Helm charts for configuring additional container arguments: volumeMounts and volumes. Can be used in conjunction with cert-manager istio-csr. (Issue #113)
Added values to the Istiod Helm chart for configuring topologySpreadConstraints on the Deployment. Can be used for better placement of Istiod workloads. (Issue #42938)
Added Allow setting terminationGracePeriodSeconds for ztunnel pod via Helm chart.
Fixed an issue where removing field(s) from IstioOperator and re-installing did not reflect changes in existing IstioOperator spec. (Issue #42068)
Fixed ValidatingWebhookConfiguration not being generated correctly with operator installation when the revision is not set. (Issue #43893)
Fixed an issue where the operator did not reject invalid CIDR entries that included spaces. (Issue #45338)
Fixed an issue where the hostname package is not listed as a dependency for the VM packages. (Issue #45866)
Fixed an issue preventing the Gateway chart from being used with a custom HorizontalPodAutoscaler resource.
Fixed an issue that Istio should using IMDSv2 as possible on AWS. (Issue #45825)
Fixed OpenShift profile setting sidecarInjectorWebhook causing k8s.v1.cni.cncf.io/networks to be overwritten when using multiple networks. (Issue #43632),(Issue #45034)
Fixed a null traversal issue when using datadog or stackdriver with no tracing options. (Issue #45855)
Fixed an issue preventing the ports of waypoint and ztunnel ports from being exposed. Scraped configuration files can be created for ambient components, too. (Issue #45093)
Removed the following experimental istioctl commands: add-to-mesh, remove-from-mesh and kube-uninject. Usage of automatic sidecar injection is recommended instead.
Removed the ENABLE_LEGACY_FSGROUP_INJECTION feature flag. This was intended to support Kubernetes 1.18 and older, which are out of support.
Removed obsolete manifests from the base Helm chart. See Upgrade Notes for more information.

istioctl

Improved IST0123 warning message description.
Updated istioctl experimental workload configure command to accept IPv6 address passed with --ingressIP.
Added config type and endpoint configuration summaries to istioctl proxy-config all. (Issue #43807)
Added directory support for istioctl validate. Now, the -f flag accepts both file paths and directory paths.
Added support for YAML output to istioctl admin log.
Added support for checking telemetry labels, which now includes Istio canonical labels and Kubernetes recommended labels.
Added support for namespace filtering for proxy statuses. Note: please ensure that both istioctl and istiod are upgraded for this feature to work.
Added support for validating JSON files to istioctl validate. (Issue #46136),(Issue #46136)
Added warning if user specifies more than one Istio label in the same namespace. Including istio-injection, istio.io/rev, istio.io/dataplane-mode.
Added support for displaying multiple addresses of listeners in istioctl proxy-config listeners.
Fixed verify-install failing to detect DaemonSet component statuses.
Fixed an issue where the cert validity was not accurate in the istioctl proxy-config secret command.
Fixed an issue where xDS proxy-status was showing inaccurate Istio version. Note: please ensure that both istioctl and istiod are upgraded for this fix to work.
Fixed an issue where ztunnel pods could be compared to Envoy configuration files in istioctl proxy-status and istioctl experimental proxy-status. They are now excluded from the comparison.
Fixed an issue where there was a parse error when performing rootCA comparison for ztunnel pods.
Fixed an issue where analyzers were reporting messages for the gateway-managed services.
Fixed an issue where specifying multiple include conditions by --include in istioctl bug-report didn’t work as expected. (Issue #45839)
Fixed an issue where Kubernetes resources with revision labels were being filtered out by istioctl analyze when the --revision flag was not used. (Issue #46239)
Fixed an issue where the creation of a Telemetry object without any providers throws the IST0157 error. (Issue #46510)
Fixed an issue where the analyzer produced incorrect results for GatewayPortNotOnWorkload when there was an incorrect association of Gateway.Spec.Servers[].Port.Number with a Service’s Port instead of its TargetPort.
Fixed revision flag missing in istioctl experimental precheck.
Removed uninstall command from istioctl experimental. Use istioctl uninstall instead.
Removed the following experimental istioctl commands: create-remote-secret and remote-clusters. They have been moved to the top level istioctl command.

Documentation changes

Improved Bookinfo samples so they can now be used in OpenShift without the anyuid SCC privilege.