Announcing Istio 0.5

Major Update

February 2, 2018 | 2 minute read

In addition to the usual pile of bug fixes and performance improvements, this release includes the new or updated features detailed below.

Download and install this release.

Visit the documentation for this release.

Networking

Incremental Istio Deployment. (Preview) You can now adopt Istio incrementally, more easily than before, by installing only the components you want (e.g, Pilot+Ingress only as the minimal Istio install). Refer to the istioctl CLI tool for generating a information on customized Istio deployments.
Automatic Proxy Injection. We leverage Kubernetes 1.9’s new mutating webhook feature to provide automatic pod-level proxy injection. Automatic injection requires Kubernetes 1.9 or beyond and therefore doesn’t work on older versions. The alpha initializer mechanism is no longer supported. Learn more
Revised Traffic Rules. Based on user feedback, we have made significant changes to Istio’s traffic management (routing rules, destination rules, etc.). We would love your continuing feedback while we polish this in the coming weeks.

Open Policy Agent. Mixer now has an authorization adapter implementing the open policy agent model, providing a flexible fine-grained access control mechanism. Learn more
Istio RBAC. Mixer now has a role-based access control adapter. Learn more
Fluentd. Mixer now has an adapter for log collection through Fluentd. Learn more
Stdio. The stdio adapter now lets you log to files with support for log rotation & backup, along with a host of controls.

Bring Your Own CA. There have been many enhancements to the ‘bring your own CA’ feature. Learn more
PKCS8. Add support for PKCS8 keys to Istio PKI.
Istio RBAC Istio RBAC provides access control for services in Istio mesh. Learn more.

Release-Mode Binaries. We switched release and installation default to release for improved performance and security.
Component Logging. Istio components now offer a rich set of command-line options to control local logging, including common support for log rotation.
Consistent Version Reporting. Istio components now offer a consistent command-line interface to report their version information.
Optional Instance Fields. Within configuration, definitions of Mixer instances no longer need to include every field of the associated template. Omitted fields get a zero or empty value.