Google Cloud has submitted its popular open source service mesh technology Istio for donation to the vendor-neutral Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
“Today we are excited to announce that Google and the Istio Steering Committee have submitted the Istio project for consideration as an incubating project,” Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering at Google Cloud wrote in a blog post.
Launched in 2017, Istio allows developers to manage network traffic, telemetry, and security for applications deployed in containers and orchestrated with Kubernetes, which was itself donated to the CNCF by Google in 2015.
Other popular service mesh options include Linkerd and Consul by HashiCorp. Microsoft also announced in 2020 that it would release its own open source service mesh—called Open Service Mesh (OSM) — and transfer it to the CNCF.
Google says that if Istio is accepted by the CNCF it will continue to invest in the project as a key maintainer and through upstream contributions.
Google had initially announced during KubeCon in 2019 that it wasn’t planning on donating either its popular serverless platform Knative or Istio to the CNCF any time soon, preferring to manage Istio itself under its Open Usage Commons foundation.
Google changed direction by donating Knative in November 2021, an application that was accepted by the CNCF as an incubating project in March 2022. Now the company has followed suit with Istio.
“Istio is the last major component of organizations’ Kubernetes ecosystem to sit outside of the CNCF, and its APIs are well-aligned to Kubernetes. On the heels of our recent donation of Knative to the CNCF, acceptance of Istio will complete our cloud-native stack under the auspices of the foundation, and bring Istio closer to the Kubernetes project,” Goldberg wrote.