Istio's Steering Committee for 2024

Announcing the newest members and a proposed change to election timing.

Feb 15, 2024 | By Craig Box, for the Istio Steering Committee

The Istio Steering Committee oversees the administrative aspects of the project, including governance, branding, marketing, and working with the CNCF.

Every year, the leaders in the Istio project estimate the proportion of the hundreds of companies that have contributed to Istio in the past year, and uses that metric to proportionally allocate nine Contribution Seats on our Steering Committee.

Then, four Community Seats are voted for by our project members, with candidates being from companies that did not receive Contribution Seats.

We are pleased to share the result of this year’s calculation, and changes to our Community Seat holders as a result.

Contribution seats

The calculation for the 2024-2025 term brings the most diverse set of company representation ever in the Contribution Seats, with five companies1 represented:

CompanySeat allocation
Google3
Solo.io2
IBM/Red Hat2
DaoCloud1
Huawei1

The full allocation can be seen in our formula spreadsheet.

Community seats

As a result of this year’s calculation, two of our Community Seat holders move to Contribution Seats. This creates two extra vacancies, which are allocated to the runners-up of our last election2.

We are pleased to welcome our two newest Community Seat holders, Mitch Connors from Aviatrix and Keith Mattix from Microsoft. Both are highly active maintainers and leaders in the project, and we are delighted to have them join the Steering Committee.

Proposed changes to election timing

Our charter currently allocates Contribution Seats in February and holds the Community Seat election in July. We previously anticipated a situation where people would change seat types mid-term, and this has now come to pass.

We will therefore be voting on a change to our Charter which will move our Community Seat elections to February, to be held immediately after the allocation of Contribution Seats. It is our intention that the next annual election be held in February 2025.

The full group

Following these changes, we now have representation from nine companies:

NameCompanyProfileSeat type
Craig BoxSolo.iocraigboxContribution seat
Rob CernichRed HatrcernichContribution seat
Mitch ConnorsAviatrixtherealmitchconnorsCommunity seat
Iris (Shaojun) DingIntelirisdingbjCommunity seat
Cameron EtezadiGooglecetezadiContribution seat
John HowardGooglehowardjohnContribution seat
Faseela KEricsson Software TechnologykfaseelaCommunity seat
Kebe LiuDaoCloudkebe7junContribution seat
Jamie LongmuirRed HatlongmuirContribution seat
Keith MattixMicrosoftkeithmattixCommunity seat
Justin PettitGooglejustinpettitContribution seat
Lin SunSolo.iolinsunContribution seat
Zhonghu XuHuaweihzxuzhonghuContribution seat

Our sincerest thanks to Ameer Abbas, April Kyle Nassi, Cale Rath and Chaomeng Zhang, whose terms have come to an end.

The Steering Committee wishes to thank its members, old and new, and looks forward to continue to grow and improve Istio as a successful and sustainable open source project. We encourage everyone to get involved in the Istio community by contributing, voting, and helping us shape the future of cloud native networking.


  1. Our Steering Committee charter considers groups of companies as one, for the purposes of allocation of seats. This means we group IBM and Red Hat together as a single entity. ↩︎

  2. The first runner-up from the election was Kebe Liu from DaoCloud, who will join with their newly allocated Contribution Seat. ↩︎

Share this post