Istio was named by Tetrate founder Varun Talwar and Google Principal Engineer Louis Ryan and opened source on May 24, 2017. Today is the fourth anniversary of Istio open Source. Let’s take a look back at the past four years of Istio and look ahead to its future.
Open source history of Istio
2017 was the year that Kubernetes ended the container choreography war. Google opened Istio in order to consolidate its advantage in cloud native and compensate Kubernetes’ weakness in managing traffic between services. Here are some of the most important releases in Istio history to date.
After a year of open source development, Istio released version 0.8 two months before the 1.0 release, which was a massive refactoring of the API. At the end of July 2018, Istio reached a critical point of production availability with the release of 1.0. Since then, Google has restructured the Istio team in a major way, and several Istio-based Service Mesh startups have been born. It can be said that 2018 is the first year of the service grid industry.
Istio 1.1 was released in March 2019, nearly nine months after the 1.0 release, which is well beyond the average release cycle for an open source project. We knew that iteration and speed of evolution were the core competencies of basic software, and since then Istio has been on a steady release schedule of one release per quarter, ranking 4th in GitHub’s top 10 fastest-growing projects in 2019!
Istio community
Istio has gained 27,000 stars on GitHub and a large community of users since it opened its doors four years ago. The figure below shows the growth of Istio’s GitHub stars.
In 2020, Istio’s project management began to mature and its governance approach evolved. In 2020, the Istio community held its first governance board election and transferred the trademark to Open Usage Commons. The first IstioCon was successfully held in February 2021, with thousands of people attending the online conference. There are also a large number of Istio community users in China. In 2021, There will be a Meetup of Istio community across the street in China.
According to the CNCF 2020 survey, 46% of organizations are using service grids in production or plan to do so in the next 12 months. Istio is the most commonly used grid in production.
In the future
After four years of development, Istio has not only formed a large user base, but also created a number of Istio suppliers. You can see it on the homepage of the recently revamped Istio website. In recent releases, Istio has shifted its focus to improving the Day 2 Operation experience. We would also like to see more Istio adoption path recommendations, case studies, learning materials, training and certification (for example, the first Istio administrator certification from Tetrate) that will facilitate Istio adoption.
B station live: Istio open Source fourth Anniversary review and outlook
Want to know the history of Istio? Want to know about Istio’s self-saving architectural refactoring? Want to peek behind the scenes of Istio development? Want to take a look at the new features in the latest release? At 8:00 PM, May 25th, Beijing time, let’s meet at STATION B. Let’s review the fourth anniversary of Istio.
Istio Is a Tetrate live event dedicated to Istio and service Grid, sharing open source technologies and practices. On the occasion of Istio open Source’s fourth anniversary, the first live broadcast will invite Ma Ruofei, one of Istio’s most famous celebrities, to review the history of Istio open source and look into the future. The host will be Jimmy Song.