Istio 1.0 Released – Production‑Ready Service Mesh

Istio 1.0 released, production ready!

Today we are excited to announce Istio 1.0. This follows more than a year since the initial 0.1 release. Since 0.1, Istio has grown rapidly with the help of a thriving community, contributors, and users. Many companies have successfully deployed Istio in production and derived real value from its insight and control capabilities. We have helped large enterprises and fast‑growing startups such as eBay, Auto Trader UK, Descartes Labs, HP FitStation, Namely, PubNub and Trulia use Istio to connect, manage and protect their services from the ground up. Releasing this version as 1.0 acknowledges the core feature set that users can rely on for production.

Ecosystem

Last year we saw a dramatic growth in the Istio ecosystem. Envoy continued its impressive expansion, adding many features critical for production‑grade service meshes. Observability providers such as Datadog, SolarWinds, Sysdig, Google Stackdriver and Amazon CloudWatch wrote plugins to integrate Istio with their products. Tigera, Aporeto, Cilium and Styra built extensions for policy enforcement and networking. Red Hat’s Kiali offers a great user experience for mesh management and observability. Cloud Foundry is building the next‑generation traffic routing stack for Istio, and the recently announced Knative serverless project is doing the same. Apigee announced plans to use Istio in its API management solution. These are just a few highlights of the projects added to the ecosystem last year.

Features

Since the 0.8 release we have added several important new capabilities, and more importantly, many existing features have been promoted to Beta, indicating they are ready for production. Highlights include:

Multi‑cluster support: multiple Kubernetes clusters can be added to a single mesh, enabling cross‑cluster communication and consistent policy enforcement. Multi‑cluster is now in Beta.

Network API for fine‑grained traffic control is now in Beta. Gateways can explicitly model ingress and egress, allowing operators to control network topology and meet edge security requirements.

Incremental rollout of mutual TLS without updating all client services, removing a major barrier to production adoption.

Mixer now supports out‑of‑process adapters, simplifying the development of custom adapters in upcoming releases.

Envoy now evaluates authorization policies locally, improving performance and reliability.

Helm chart installation is now the recommended method, offering rich customization options for configuring Istio.

Significant performance investments, including continuous regression testing, large‑scale environment simulation, and targeted fixes, with detailed results to be shared in the coming weeks.

Next Steps

While this milestone is important, there is still much work to do. Feedback from adopters highlights themes such as hybrid‑cloud support, modular installation, richer networking features, and scalability for large‑scale deployments. Some of this feedback has already been incorporated into the 1.0 release, and we will continue to address these areas in the coming months.

Quick Start

If you are new to Istio and want to try it out, we encourage you to explore the documentation, join the chat forum or mailing list. If you wish to contribute more deeply to the project, attend our community meetings and say hello.

Final Note

The Istio team thanks everyone who has contributed to the project. Without your help, these achievements would not be possible. The accomplishments of the past year have been remarkable, and we look forward to achieving even greater things together in the year ahead.

Translator: Jimmy Song (宋净超)