Istio Service Mesh applies to become a CNCF project

Red Hat is excited by the news that Istio has submitted its application to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project and enthusiastically looks forward to the next chapter of the Istio 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.

Istio is at the core of Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, an open source 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.

We look forward to collaborating with the Istio community on the next leg of its journey with CNCF and beyond. Though 5 years old, we believe Istio is just getting started!

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.