Istio 1.22.0 Change Notes

Istio 1.22.0 release notes.

May 13, 2024

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.

Deprecated usage of values.istio_cni in favor of values.pilot.cni. (Issue #49290)

Traffic Management

Improved ServiceEntry with resolution: NONE to respect targetPort, if specified. This is particularly useful when doing TLS origination, allowing to set port:80, targetPort: 443. If undesired, set --compatibilityVersion=1.21 to revert to the old behavior or remove the targetPort specification.
Improved XDS generation to do utilize fewer resources when possible, sometimes omitting a response entirely. This can be disabled by the PILOT_PARTIAL_FULL_PUSHES=false environment variable, if necessary. (Issue #37989),(Issue #37974)
Added support for skipping the initial installation of the CNI entirely.
Added a node taint controller to istiod which removes the cni.istio.io/not-ready taint from a node once the Istio CNI pod is ready on that node. (Issue #48818),(Issue #48286)
Added endpoints acked generation to the proxy distribution report available through the pilot debug API /debug/config_distribution. (Issue #48985)
Added support for configuring waypoint proxies for Services.
Added capability to annotate pods, services, namespaces and other similar kinds with an annotation, istio.io/use-waypoint, to specify a waypoint in the form [<namespace name>/]<waypoint name>. This replaces the old requirement for waypoints either being scoped to the entire namespace or to a single service account. Opting out of a waypoint can also be done with a value of #none to allow a namespace-wide waypoint where specific pods or services are not guarded by a waypoint allowing greater flexibility in waypoint specification and use. (Issue #49436)
Added support for the istio.io/waypoint-for annotations in waypoint proxies. (Issue #49851)
Added a check to prevent creation of ztunnel config when user has specified a gateway as targetRef in their AuthorizationPolicy. (Issue #50110)
Added the annotation networking.istio.io/address-type to allow istio class Gateways to use ClusterIP for status addresses.
Added the ability to annotate workloads or services with istio.io/use-waypoint pointing to Gateways of arbitrary gateway classes. These changes allow configuring a standard Istio gateway as a waypoint. For this to work, it must be configured as a ClusterIP Service with redirection enabled. This is colloquially referred to as a “gateway sandwich” where the ztunnel layer handles mTLS. (Issue #48362)
Added functionality to enroll individual pods into ambient by labeling them with istio.io/dataplane-mode=ambient. (Issue #50355)
Added the ability to allow pods to be opted out of ambient redirection by using the istio.io/dataplane-mode=none label. (Issue #50736)
Removed the ability to opt-out pods from ambient redirection using the ambient.istio.io/redirection=disabled annotation, as that is a status annotation reserved for the CNI. (Issue #50736)
Added an environment variable for istiod PILOT_GATEWAY_API_DEFAULT_GATEWAYCLASS_NAME that allows overriding the name of the default GatewayClass Gateway API resource. The default value is istio.
Added an environment variable for istiod PILOT_GATEWAY_API_CONTROLLER_NAME that allows overriding the name of the Istio Gateway API controller as exposed in the spec.controllerName field in the GatewayClass resource. The default value is istio.io/gateway-controller.
Added support for using the PROXY Protocol for outbound traffic. By specifying proxyProtocol in a DestinationRule.trafficPolicy, the sidecar will send PROXY Protocol headers to the upstream service. This feature is not supported with HBONE proxy for now.
Added validation checks to reject DestinationRules with duplicate subset names.
Added field supportedFeatures on a Gateway API’s class status before the controller accepts the Gateway class. (Issue #2162)
Added checking services’ Resolution, LabelSelector, ServiceRegistry, and namespace when merging services during SidecarScope construction.
Enabled Delta xDS by default. See upgrade notes for more information. (Issue #47949)
Fixed an issue where the Kubernetes gateway was not working correctly with the namespace-scoped waypoint proxy.
Fixed an issue where the delta ADS client received a response which contained RemoveResources.
Fixed an issue that when using withoutHeaders to configure route matching rules in VirtualService. If the fields specified in withoutHeaders do not exist in the request header, Istio cannot match the request. (Issue #49537)
Fixed an issue where the priority of envoy filters is ignored when they are in root namespace and proxy namespace. (Issue #49555)
Fixed an issue where --log_as_json option did not work for the istio-init container. (Issue #44352)
Fixed an issue with massive Virtual IPs reshuffling when adding or removing a duplicated host. (Issue #49965)
Fixed Gateway status addresses receiving Service VIPs from outside the cluster.
Fixed annotation use-waypoint to be a label, for consistency. (Issue #50572)
Fixed build EDS-typed cluster endpoints with domain address. (Issue #50688)
Fixed a bug where injection template incorrectly evaluated when InboundTrafficPolicy was set to “localhost”. (Issue #50700)
Fixed added server-side keepalive to waypoint HBONE endpoints. (Issue #50737)
Fixed empty prefix match in HTTPMatchRequest not being rejected by the validating webhook. (Issue #48534)
Fixed a behavioral change in Istio 1.20 that caused merging of ServiceEntries with the same hostname and port names to give unexpected results. (Issue #50478)
Fixed a bug when a Sidecar resource not merging ports correctly when it is configured with multiple egress listeners with different ports of a Kubernetes service. This lead to creating only one Cluster with the first port, and the second port was ignored.
Fixed an issue causing routes to be overwritten by other virtual services.
Removed the values.cni.privileged flag from istio-cni node agent chart in favor of feature-specific permissions. (Issue #49004)
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_HEADLESS_SERVICE_POD_LISTENERS feature flag.
Removed the PILOT_ENABLE_INBOUND_PASSTHROUGH setting, which has been enabled-by-default for the past 8 releases. This feature can now be configured using a new Inbound Traffic Policy Mode.

Security

Updated the default value of the feature flag ENABLE_AUTO_ENHANCED_RESOURCE_SCOPING to true.
Added support for path templating in AuthorizationPolicy. See Envoy URI template docs. (Issue #16585)
Added support for customizing the connection timeout setting when resolving jwksUri. (Issue #47328)
Added support for Istio CA to handle node authorization for CSRs with impersonating the identity of remote clusters. This could help Istio CA to authenticate ztunnel in remote clusters in an external control plane scenario. (Issue #47489)
Added an environment variable METRICS_LOCALHOST_ACCESS_ONLY for disabling metrics endpoint from outside of the pod, to allow only localhost access. User can set this with command arguments --set values.pilot.env.METRICS_LOCALHOST_ACCESS_ONLY=true for control plane and --set meshConfig.defaultConfig.proxyMetadata.METRICS_LOCALHOST_ACCESS_ONLY=true for proxy during istioctl installation.
Added Certificate Revocation List (CRL) support for peer certificate validation based on file paths specified in ClientTLSSettings in destination rule for Sidecars, and in ServerTLSSettings in Gateway for Gateways.
Fixed list matching for the audience claims in JWT tokens. (Issue #49913)
Removed the first-party-jwt legacy option for values.global.jwtPolicy. Support for the more secure third-party-jwt has been default for many years and is supported in all Kubernetes platforms.

Telemetry

Improved JSON access logs to emit keys in a consistent order.
Added option to export OpenTelemetry traces via HTTP. (reference) (Issue #47835)
Enabled configuring Dynatrace Sampler as the OpenTelemetryTracingProvider in MeshConfig. (Issue #50001)
Enabled configuring Resource Detectors as the OpenTelemetryTracingProvider in MeshConfig. (Issue #48885)
Fixed an issue where TraceId was not propagated when using OpenTelemetry access logger. (Issue #49911)
Removed default tracing configuration that enables tracing to zipkin.istio-system.svc. See upgrade notes for more information.

Extensibility

Improved using the tag-stripped URL and checksum as a Wasm module cache key, where the tagged URL is separately cached. This may increase the chance of cache hits (e.g., trying to find the same image with both of the tagged and digest URLs.) In addition, this will be a base to implement ImagePullPolicy.

Installation

Improved Helm value field names to configure whether an existing CNI install will be used. Instead of values.istio_cni the enablement fields will be in values.pilot.cni, as istiod is the affected component. The new setting is more clear than having values.cni for install config and values.istio_cni for enablement in istiod. The old values.istio_cni fields will still be supported for at least two releases. (Issue #49290)
Improved the meshConfig.defaultConfig.proxyMetadata field to do a deep merge when overridden, rather than replacing all values.
Added the ability to add customized annotations to istiod service account resource through the Helm chart.
Added the openshift-ambient profile. (Issue #42341)
Added a new, optional experimental admission policy that only allows stable features/fields to be used in Istio APIs. (Issue #173)
Added support for configuring CA bundles for validation and injection webhooks.
Fixed gathering pprof data from the local ztunnel admin endpoint, which would fail due to the lack of a writable in-container /tmp. (Issue #50060)
Removed deprecated external profile. Please use the remote profile instead for installation. (Issue #48634)

istioctl

Added the istioctl proxy-status command, which is the promoted istioctl experimental proxy-status command. The old istioctl proxy-status command has been removed. This promotion should not result in any loss of functionality. However, the request is now sent based on xDS instead of HTTP, and we have introduced a set of new xDS-based flags to target the control plane.
Added support for multi-cluster analysis in istioctl analyze command when there are remote cluster secrets set up through Install Multicluster.
Added a new istioctl dashboard proxy command, which can be used to show the admin UI of different proxy pods, for example: Envoy, ztunnel, and waypoint.
Added the --proxy option to istioctl experimental wait command. (Issue #48696)
Added namespace filtering to istioctl proxy-config workload command using the --workloads-namespace flag to display workloads in the specified namespace.
Added the istioctl dashboard istio-debug command to display the Istio debug endpoints dashboard.
Added the istioctl experimental describe command to support displaying the details of policies for PortLevelSettings. (Issue #49802)
Added ability to define the traffic address type (service, workload, all or none) for waypoints via the --for flag when using the istioctl experimental waypoint apply command. (Issue #49896)
Added the ability to name waypoints through istioctl via the --name flag on the waypoint command. (Issue #49915), (Issue #50173)
Removed the ability to specify a service account for the waypoint by deleting the --service-account flag on the waypoint command. (Issue #49915), (Issue #50173)
Added the ability to enroll a waypoint proxy in the waypoint’s namespace through istioctl via the --enroll-namespace flag on the waypoint command. (Issue #50248)
Added the istioctl ztunnel-config command. This allow users to view ztunnel configuration information via the istioctl ztunnel-config workload command. (Issue #49841)
Removed the workload flag from proxy-config command. Use istioctl ztunnel-config workload command to view ztunnel configuration information instead. (Issue #49841)
Added a warning when using istioctl experimental waypoint apply --enroll-namespace and the namespace is not labeled for ambient redirection. (Issue #50396)
Added the --for flag to istioctl experimental waypoint generate command so that the user can preview the YAML before they apply it. (Issue #50790)
Added an experimental OpenShift Kubernetes platform profile to istioctl. To install with the OpenShift profile, use istioctl install --set profile=openshift. See OpenShift Platform Setup and Install OpenShift using istioctl documents for more information.
Added the flag --proxy-admin-port to the command istioctl experimental envoy-stats to set a custom proxy admin port.
Fixed an issue where the istioctl experimental proxy-status <pod> compare command was not working due to unknown configs.
Fixed the istioctl describe command not displaying Ingress information under non istio-system namespaces. (Issue #50074)