May 24, 2024 | By Lin Sun - Solo.io, for the Istio Steering Committee
On this day in 2017, Google and IBM announced the launch of the Istio service mesh. Istio
is an open technology that enables developers to seamlessly connect, manage, and secure networks of different
services — regardless of platform, source, or vendor. We can hardly believe that Istio turns seven today! To
celebrate the project’s 7th birthday, we wanted to highlight Istio’s momentum and its exciting future.
Rapid adoption among users
Istio, the most widely adopted service mesh project in the world, has been gathering significant momentum since
its inception in 2017. Last year Istio joined Kubernetes, Prometheus, and other stalwarts of the cloud native
ecosystem with its CNCF graduation.
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, Splunk, FICO, T-Mobile, Salesforce, and many others.
Istio’s control plane and sidecar are the #3 and #4 most downloaded images on Docker Hub, each with over 10 billion downloads.
We have over 35,000 GitHub stars on Istio’s main repository, with continuing growth. Thank you everyone who starred the istio/istio repo.
We asked a few of our users for their thoughts on the occasion of Istio’s 7th birthday:
Amazing diversity of contributors and vendors
Over the past year, our community has observed tremendous growth in terms of both the number of contributing
companies and the number of contributors. Recall that Istio had 500 contributors when it turned three years
old? We have had over 1,700 contributors in the past year!
With Microsoft’s Open Service Mesh team joining
the Istio community, we added Azure to the list of clouds and enterprise Kubernetes vendors providing Istio-compatible solutions, including Google Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, Huawei Cloud, DaoCloud, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Akamai Cloud and Alibaba Cloud. We are also delighted to see the Amazon Web Services team publish the EKS Blueprint for Istio
due to high demand from users wanting to run Istio on AWS.
Specialist network software providers are also driving Istio forward, with Solo.io, Tetrate and F5 Networks all offering enterprise Istio solutions that will run in any environment.
Below are the top contributing companies for the past year, with Solo.io, Google, and DaoCloud taking the top
three places. While most of these companies are Istio vendors, Salesforce and Ericsson are end users, running Istio in production!
Here are some thoughts from our community leaders:
Continuous technical innovation
We are firm believers that diversity drives innovation. What amazes us most is the continuous innovation from the
Istio community, from making upgrades easier, to adopting Kubernetes Gateway API, to adding the new sidecar-less
ambient data plane mode, to making Istio easy to use and as transparent as possible.
Istio’s ambient mode was introduced in September 2022, designed for simplified
operations, broader application compatibility, and reduced infrastructure cost. Ambient mode introduces
lightweight, shared Layer 4 (L4) node proxies and optional Layer 7 (L7) proxies, removing the need for traditional
sidecar proxies from the data plane. The core innovation behind ambient mode is that it slices the L4 and L7
processing into two distinct layers. This layered approach allows you to adopt Istio incrementally, enabling a
smooth transition from no mesh, to a secure overlay (L4), to optional full L7 processing — on a per-namespace
basis, as needed, across your fleet.
Become an Istio contributor and developer by submitting a membership request, after you have a pull request merged.
If you are already part of the Istio community, please wish the Istio project a happy 7th birthday, and share your
thoughts about the project on social media. Thank you for your help and support!
