Announcing Istio 1.6.6

This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.6.5 and Istio 1.6.6.

Changes

• Optimized performance in scenarios with large numbers of gateways. (Issue 25116)
• Fixed an issue where out of order events may cause the Istiod update queue to get stuck. This resulted in proxies with stale configuration.
• Fixed istioctl upgrade so that it no longer checks remote component versions when using --dry-run. (Issue 24865)
• Fixed long log messages for clusters with many gateways.
• Fixed outlier detection to only fire on user configured errors and not depend on success rate. (Issue 25220)
• Fixed demo profile to use port 15021 as the status port. (Issue #25626)
• Fixed Galley to properly handle errors from Kubernetes tombstones.
• Fixed an issue where manually enabling TLS/mTLS for communication between a sidecar and an egress gateway did not work. (Issue 23910)
• Fixed Bookinfo demo application to verify if a specified namespace exists and if not, use the default namespace.
• Added a label to the pilot_xds metric in order to give more information on data plane versions without scraping the data plane.
• Added CA_ADDR field to allow configuring the certificate authority address on the egress gateway configuration and fixed the istio-certs mount secret name.
• Updated Bookinfo demo application to latest versions of libraries.
• Updated Istio to disable auto mTLS when sending traffic to headless services without a sidecar.