“For over 20 years, Google has helped shape the future of computing with its open source contributions and has invested deeply to unlock innovation for our customers,” Google VP of Engineering Chen Goldberg writes in today’s announcement. “Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the Envoy service proxy. Istio works with both Kubernetes-based and traditional workloads, and brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments. Finding a home in the CNCF brings Istio closer to the cloud-native ecosystem and will foster continuing open innovation.”
Service meshes may not seem like the most exciting of projects, but they are often a fundamental technology for managing large container deployments. The idea here is to have a tool that can manage all of the messaging between services, which can quickly become difficult in a system where (micro-)services — and the machines they run on — are ephemeral.
The Istio project launched version 1.5 of Istio in 2018. That’s often the point where vendors start looking for a foundation for their open source project. The fact that Google didn’t do that puzzled quite a few pundits, but the Istio team then also launched a re-architected version of the software with the launch of version 1.5.
Google says it has made over half of all contributions to Istio and two-thirds of the commits.
“IBM fully believes in open governance and the power of community. Therefore, we enthusiastically applaud today’s submission of Istio to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF),” IBM’s Briana Frank and Michael Maximilien write in today’s announcement. “IBM has worked alongside Google and other key partners since the inception of the Istio project five years ago and helped to lead the open source community with our contributions to code, innovations, blog posts, documentation and steering committee, and by leading various technical workstreams.”
