Istio 1.6 Released, migration to Istiod is complete

May 21, development team of “Istio”, a service mesh that offers microservice management features for container clusters, released the latest version “Istio 1.6”. They have completed their tasks of moving functionality into Istiod and brings support for non-Kubernetes workloads.

Istio is an open-source platform for connecting, managing and securing microservices. It is equipped with features for controlling the flow of traffic and API calls between services, and automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging features within a service. It also offers security features such as encryption and authentication between services.

The latest Istio 1.6 is the successor of version 1.5, released in March. In Istio 1.6, the functionality has been fully moved into Istiod, a module introduced in version 1.5 to reduce the number of components in an Istio installation. This led to removing components that were disabled by default in version 1.5: Citadel, Sidecar Injector, and Galley.

It now supports appProtocol field (introduced in Kubernetes 1.18 as an alpha) in EndpointPort or ServicePort API, eliminating the need to append the name field in the service to denote protocol.

It introduces WorkloadEntrty as its new API. By using this API when adding non-Kubernetes workloads to meshes, the VM or bare metal workloads, which used to be treated just as an endpoint with an IP address, are now elevated to the same level as a Kubernetes pod.

With regards to lifecycle, the command-line tool “istioctl” has been improved to give better diagnostic information, and Istioctl Analyze is now an official function.

There are numerous small feature improvements added in regards to network, security, and traffic control.

Istio
https://istio.io/