Feature Status
This page lists the relative maturity and support level of every Istio feature. Please note that the phases (Alpha, Beta, and Stable) are applied to individual features within the project, not to the project as a whole. Here is a high level description of what these labels mean.
Feature phase definitions
| Alpha | Beta | Stable | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Demo-able, works end-to-end but has limitations. If you use it in production and encounter a serious issue we may not be able to fix it for you, so be sure that you can continue to function if you have to disable it | Usable in production, not a toy anymore | Dependable, production hardened |
| API | No guarantees on backward compatibility | APIs are versioned | Dependable, production-worthy. APIs are versioned, with automated version conversion for backward compatibility |
| Performance | Not quantified or guaranteed | Not quantified or guaranteed | Performance (latency/scale) is quantified, documented, with guarantees against regression |
| Deprecation Policy | None | Weak - 3 months | Dependable, Firm. 1 year notice will be provided before changes |
| Security | Security vulnerabilities will be handled publicly as simple bug fixes | Security vulnerabilities will be handled according to our security vulnerability policy | Security vulnerabilities will be handled according to our security vulnerability policy |
Istio features
Below is our list of existing features and their current phases. This information will be updated after every monthly release.
Traffic Management
| Feature | Phase |
|---|---|
| Protocols: HTTP1.1 / HTTP2 / gRPC / TCP | Stable |
| Protocols: Websockets / MongoDB | Stable |
| Traffic Control: label/content based routing, traffic shifting | Stable |
| Resilience features: timeouts, retries, connection pools, outlier detection | Stable |
| Gateway: Ingress, Egress for all protocols | Stable |
| TLS termination and SNI Support in Gateways | Stable |
| SNI (multiple certs) at ingress | Stable |
| Locality load balancing | Beta |
| Enabling custom filters in Envoy | Alpha |
| CNI container interface | Alpha |
| Sidecar API | Alpha |
The Sidecar runtime is considered Beta. However, its API is still subject to a backwards incompatible change. Due to this, we advertise it as Alpha.
Telemetry
| Feature | Phase |
|---|---|
| Prometheus Integration | Stable |
| Local Logging (STDIO) | Stable |
| Statsd Integration | Stable |
| Client and Server Telemetry Reporting | Stable |
| Service Dashboard in Grafana | Stable |
| Istio Component Dashboard in Grafana | Stable |
| Distributed Tracing | Stable |
| Stackdriver Integration | Beta |
| Distributed Tracing to Zipkin / Jaeger | Beta |
| Logging with Fluentd | Beta |
| Trace Sampling | Beta |
Security and Policy Enforcement
The ‘Authorization (RBAC)’ runtime is considered Beta. However, its API is still subject to a backwards incompatible change. Due to this, we advertise it as Alpha.
Core
| Feature | Phase |
|---|---|
| Operator installation | Alpha |
| Kubernetes: Envoy Installation and Traffic Interception | Stable |
| Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Installation | Stable |
| Attribute Expression Language | Stable |
| Mixer Out-of-Process Adapter Authoring Model | Beta |
| Helm | Beta |
| Multicluster Mesh over VPN | Alpha |
| Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Upgrade | Beta |
| Consul Integration | Alpha |
| Basic Configuration Resource Validation | Beta |
| Configuration Processing with Galley | Beta |
| Mixer Self Monitoring | Beta |
| Custom Mixer Build Model | deprecated |
| Out of Process Mixer Adapters (gRPC Adapters) | Beta |
| Istio CNI plugin | Alpha |
| IPv6 support for Kubernetes | Alpha |
| Distroless base images for Istio | Alpha |