The Istio open Source project marked an important milestone today with the release of Istio version 1.0. For today’s press release, I interviewed Shriram Rajagopalan, one of the founders of Istio and the technical lead for the network subsystem in the Istio project. Shriram works side by side with community contributors from Google, Lyft, IBM, and others, actively contributing to Istio and Envoy projects. Shriram, meanwhile, is one of the founding members of IBM’s Amalgam8 project. Currently, Shriram is an engineer at VMware, working closely with VMware’s enterprise customers to develop service grid solutions. An interesting fact: Shriram wrote the initial version of the Istio Bookinfo sample application. You can follow him on Twitter at Shriram—@rshriram. In this interview, Shriram shared many of his thoughts and insights on the topic of Istio and service grid. For example, what is the main goal of Istio1.0 release and how it recommends that enterprises adopt Istio. Now check out our interview with Shriram…
Q: What are the main goals of the iso 1.0 release?
Shriram: Istio 1.0 as a whole is an upgrade to existing features and ensures that Istio can be phased in in a non-intrusive manner in production environments. When we started enabling bidirectional TLS authentication on a service-by-service basis, some interesting issues arose with incremental deployment of Istio. We need to ensure that when bidirectional TLS authentication is enabled for services, older clients can continue to communicate with the same service on the same port via plain text, while newer ISTIo-enabled clients need to communicate via mTLS. Another area we are looking at is the upgrade capability for version 0.8 and future releases. We had to make sure that we could upgrade the grid control plane smoothly without interrupting interservice communication and support both old and new versions of agents.