Announcing Istio 1.14

Jun 1, 2022

We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.14!

This is the second Istio release of 2022. We would like to thank the entire Istio community for helping to get Istio 1.14.0 published. Special thanks are due to the release managers Lei Tang (Google) and Greg Hanson (Solo.io), and to Test & Release WG lead Eric Van Norman (IBM) for his continued help and guidance.

Here are some of the highlights of the release:

Support for the SPIRE runtime

SPIRE is a production-ready implementation of the SPIFFE specification, that offers pluggable multi-factor attestation and SPIFFE federation. We’ve made changes in the way we integrate with external Certificate Authorities, using the Envoy SDS API, to enable support for SPIRE. Thanks to the team at HP Enterprise for contributing this work!

SPIRE enables the introduction of strongly attested identities through the use of a combination of different attestation mechanisms. It provides a variety of node and workload attestors out of the box for workloads running in Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker and through a plugin oriented architecture, it also enables the use of custom attestors. The project has a pluggable integration with custom Key Management Systems for storing the CA private keys, and enables integration with existing PKIs through the Upstream Certificate Authority plugin. SPIRE implements SPIFFE Federation, enabling workloads to trust peers in a different trust domain, in a configurable and flexible way through the Federation API.

For more information, check out the documentation and this video from the HP Enterprise and Solo.io teams.

Add auto-sni support

Some servers require SNI be included in a request. This new feature configures SNI automatically without users manually configuring it or using an EnvoyFilter resource. For more information, check out the pull request 38604 and the pull request 38238.

Add support for configuring the TLS version for Istio workloads

TLS version is important for security. This new feature adds support for configuring the minimum TLS version for Istio workloads. For more information, check out the documentation.

Telemetry improvements

The Telemetry API has undergone a number of improvements, including support for OpenTelemetry access logging, filtering based on WorkloadMode, and more.

Upgrading to 1.14

When you upgrade, we would like to hear from you! Please take a few minutes to respond to a brief survey to let us know how we’re doing.

You can also join the conversation at Discuss Istio, or join our Slack workspace. Would you like to contribute directly to Istio? Find and join one of our Working Groups and help us improve.

IstioCon wrap up

IstioCon 2022, the second edition of the project’s conference, took place Apr 25-29. We had almost 4,000 registered participants, with a 4.⁵⁄₅ satisfaction score. The conference was held in English and Chinese, with people joining from 120 countries all over the world. During April 2022, the month of the conference, 81% of users on istio.io were first time users. We will be sharing a more detailed report of the event on events.istio.io.

CNCF news

We’re so pleased at the response to our announcement that Istio has been proposed to the CNCF. We’re hard at work on our application, and hope to have more to share in the coming months!

See also