Istio Graduates from Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the graduation of Istio, an open source service mesh that provides a uniform and efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services in cloud native applications. Istio was initially developed by Google and IBM and built on the Envoy project from Lyft. The project now has maintainers from more than 16 companies, including many of the largest networking vendors and cloud organizations worldwide.

End users range from digital native startups to the world's largest financial institutions and telcos, with case studies from companies including eBay, T-Mobile, Airbnb and Salesforce.com. Istio is the third most active CNCF project in terms of the number of PRs opened and merged. This year, the Istio community welcomed the maintainers of the Open Service Mesh project, with the team from Microsoft becoming Istio contributors.

The combined group continues to drive the development of the Kubernetes Gateway API, which traces its lineage directly to Istio's traffic management model. The inaugural Istio Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 was the second best attended of all the co-located events and will be a full-day event on November 6th during the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023. The two IstioCon events have attracted an audience of more than 4,000 end users, developers and maintainers. A third annual IstioCon will be hosted by CNCF on the 25th and 26th of September, 2023. A full day of in-person content in Chinese will be offered alongside KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China in Shanghai, with two days of virtual content in English for the worldwide Istio audience. The CFP is open for sessions in Chinese and English through July 23, 2023. Istio's graduation validates its commitment to openness, collaboration, and innovation and marks it as a respected technology that has proven its value and viability in the cloud native ecosystem.