Red Hat Congratulates Istio on graduating at the CNCF

Red Hat congratulates Istio on becoming a graduated project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! As one of the early supporters and leading contributors to Istio, we believe this is another important step in Istio’s journey to become the de facto standard service mesh.

Istio is at the core of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, an open source fully supported enterprise grade mesh solution that includes the Kiali console for managing Istio.

Since the project’s early days, Red Hat has seen the importance of moving common application concerns out of individual services and into an infrastructure layer - a service mesh. This has become even more important with the growth of microservices and distributed applications where enterprises may be managing thousands of services across on-prem, public and private clouds. In these environments, a service mesh can broadly enforce mTLS encryption, enable zero-trust networking policies, manage traffic for continuous delivery and much more while developers are freed up to focus on their business logic.

Becoming a graduated CNCF project is a significant milestone for the Istio project. It reflects that Istio is backed by a strong multi-vendor community that now includes large vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Google, F5, VMWare, Cisco, Intel and Ericsson, Istio specialists like Solo.io and Tetrate.io and many others. It reflects that Istio has passed an independent 3rd party security audit and governance reviews, while obtaining significant industry adoption.

While it has been a long journey, we are even more excited about what the future holds for the Istio project. The developing Istio Ambient mesh topology enables a service mesh where sidecars become optional, and application deployments need not be modified - or even restarted to be included in a service mesh.

As mentioned in our Service Mesh 2.4 announcement, we are planning to double down on our support for Istio - both for our customers and the community. Later this summer, we will be previewing a new Istio operator on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that will be the basis for a future OpenShift Service Mesh 3.0. This new major release will aim to support Red Hat customers on the latest from the Istio community. 

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