Red Hat Congratulates Istio on Joining the CNCF

Red Hat congratulates Istio on its acceptance to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project! As one of the early supporters and leading contributors to Istio, we believe this is an important step toward becoming an industry standard for service mesh. 

As a vendor-neutral, end user-driven open source ecosystem, the CNCF offers projects like Istio the opportunity to scale and encourage additional collaborators to come onboard. We believe this step will serve to accelerate both the growth of the Istio community and the development of the project by encouraging even greater openness and collaboration.

Istio is at the core of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, an open source fully supported enterprise grade mesh solution that includes:

• Kiali - A management console for Istio service mesh that was created by Red Hat to aid with service Istio visualization and management.
• Jaeger - A distributed tracing system created at Uber and heavily maintained by Red Hat.

OpenShift Service Mesh provides a uniform approach for managing and observing traffic between distributed applications. This enables users to: 

• Transparently support TLS encryption across all applications
• Create fine grained application-level policies (as opposed to network-level IP policies or Kubernetes network policies) to manage zero-trust networking environments.
• Improve reliability with automatic retries, circuit breakers, failover rules and fault injection testing between applications.
• Automatically provide metrics, logs and traces for all traffic between services - via Kiali and Jaeger.
• Deploy new versions of services and manage traffic for blue/green deployments, traffic mirroring, A/B testing, and more.

A lot is happening in the service mesh space these days! Of note is the GAMMA (Gateway API for Mesh Management and Administration) initiative that aims to bring service mesh use cases into the evolving Kubernetes Gateway API project. OpenShift Service Mesh users may begin experimenting with Gateway API in our 2.2 release.

There is also the newly announced “ambient mesh” for Istio, which aims to provide a “side-car-less” data plane mode for Istio. Both of these efforts look incredibly promising for the future of Istio, and we look forward to continuing to collaborate on them and other initiatives.

For OpenShift Service Mesh, we will be releasing version 2.3 in the coming weeks which will bring Istio 1.14 to our users. Next year, we plan to continue closing gaps with upstream Istio - such that we can bring the fruits of increased community collaboration to our users.

For more information, see the Istio community announcement.

We encourage others to get involved in the Istio project. OpenShift users can learn more about OpenShift Service Mesh here.