Announcing Istio 1.2

Jun 18, 2019

We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.2!

The theme of 1.2 is Predictable Releases - predictable in quality (we want every release to be a good release) as well as in time (we want to be able to ship on well known schedules).

As nearly anyone using Istio 1.0 noticed, it took us a long time to get 1.1 out. Far too long. One of the reasons was that we needed to do some work on our testing and infrastructure – it was simply far too manual a process to build, test and release. Because of that, 1.2 focuses on improving the stability of these new features, and improving general product health.

In order to make release quality and timing predictable, we declared a “Code Mauve”, meaning that we would spend the next iteration focusing on project infrastructure. As a result, we’ve been investing a ton of effort in our build, test and release machinery.

We formed 3 new teams (GitHub Workflow, Source Organization, Testing Methodology, and Build & Release Automation). Each had a set of issues to take on and a set of exit criteria. Code Mauve isn’t over yet, in fact we expect it to go on for some time. We’re putting in place the infrastructure to measure the metrics each team decided on (paraphrasing Peter Drucker: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it).

You might have noticed that the patch releases for 1.1 have been coming fast and furious.

In order to get features in the hands of our customers and users as soon as possible, most of the new features from the last three months have been delivered in 1.1.x releases. With 1.2, those features are now officially part of the release.

We’re seeing early results from the usability group. In the release notes, you’ll find that you can now set log levels for the control plane and the data plane globally. You can use istioctl to validate that your Kubernetes installation meets Istio’s requirements. And the new traffic.sidecar.istio.io/includeInboundPorts annotation to eliminate the need for service owner to declare containerPort in the deployment yaml.

Some of the features have matured as well. The following features have progressed from Beta status to Stable: SNI at ingress, distributed tracing, and service tracing. The following features have reached beta status: cert management on ingress, configuration resource validation, and configuration processing with Galley. We know there are lots of feature requests outstanding, and we have an exciting roadmap (watch for a forthcoming post from the TOC on that). The work we have done in this release has taken care of some technical debt which will help us get those features out reliably in future.

As always, there is also a lot happening in the Community Meeting (Thursdays at 11 a.m. Pactific) and in the Working Groups. And if you haven’t yet joined the conversation at discuss.istio.io, head over, log in with your GitHub credentials and join us!

See also