Happy Birthday, Istio!

Celebrating Istio’s 4th birthday

Four years ago today, the Istio project was born to the open source world. To celebrate this anniversary, we are hosting a week-long birthday celebration that focuses on contributions to the Istio project that stem from using Istio in production. Read on to learn how to participate in this celebration and enter a chance to win some Istio swag.

A year of important developments for Istio

Over the last 12 months, the Istio project has been very focused on the day-0 & day-1 experience for users by actively listening to our users through UX surveys and GitHub issues.

• We simplified the control plane architecture and made Istio easier to install, configure and upgrade.
• We provided clarity and process to our feature status and promotion of features and APIs.
• We simplified the debugging experience with various istioctl commands.
• We expanded the mesh to services running in VMs and multiple clusters.
• We made StatefulSet easier to use in Istio 1.10 with zero-configuration.
• We made various performance improvements to the Istio control plane and data plane via discovery selectors, sidecar resources etc.
• We introduced WebAssembly as our extensibility platform which has helped users tailor Istio to their needs.
• We beefed up our CVE management and release processes to meet enterprise needs.

Read more about improvements to Istio in 2020 that made this technology easier to use.

In February 2021, we celebrated the first IstioCon! This community-led event was an opportunity for users and developers to share many examples of how they use Istio in production and lessons learned from it. IstioCon was a great opportunity to feature more than 25 end-user companies, like Salesforce, T-Mobile, and Airbnb, among others, to feature maintainers from across the Istio ecosystem, and to share the Istio project roadmap.

This inaugural community conference was a major success, with more than 4,000 registrants from 80 countries participating. The program was conducted during US and Asia time zones, and in English and Chinese languages to accommodate big user communities in various continents. Learn more about the impact of IstioCon and find the presentations on the conference website.

How to participate in Istio’s 4th Birthday celebration

Contributions are key to the long life of an open source project. This is why, on its 4th birthday, we want to hear about your contributions to the Istio project. To participate in this campaign, share on Twitter a contribution you made to the project and why it matters, using the hashtag #IstioTurns4 and #IstioBirthday. You can submit posts from Monday, May 24th at 9 am Pacific, until Friday, May 28th, at 12 pm Pacific, to enter a chance to win some Istio swag.

The other way of participating in this campaign is by joining the Istio community meetup, which will take place on Thursday, May 27th at 10 am Pacific. At this event, we will have Pratima Nambiar discuss contributions that have stemmed from using Istio in production at Salesforce. Join the event, and ask a question or make a comment on the demo, and enter a chance to win some Istio swag.