toc Proposing Istio to become a CNCF project

On behalf of the Istio Steering Committee, please find attached a proposal for Istio to become a CNCF project.

What is Istio?

Istio is an open source service mesh that provides a uniform, efficient and transparent way to secure, connect, and monitor services in cloud native applications. It supports zero-trust networking, policy enforcement, traffic management, load balancing, and monitoring; all without requiring applications to be rewritten.

Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a configurable, application-aware network leveraging the Envoy service proxy. It can manage cloud native and traditional workloads alike, supporting from single-cluster to complex multi-network deployments.

Why are we proposing to join the CNCF?

Istio is taking this step as a mature project, approaching its 5th birthday. At this stage, it has reached a maturity where it can be a major driver for adoption of the cloud native model and ecosystem more broadly.

With the recent acceptance of Knative as an incubating project to the CNCF, we feel that it is the ideal time to join a vendor-neutral home for further community-driven innovation. This includes the ownership of the Istio trademark, which will be transferred to the Linux Foundation. The trademark will remain available for the community to use under the Open Usage Commons' published usage guidelines.

Istio stands on the shoulders of several CNCF projects, such as Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, Prometheus and SPIFFE, and many contributors in the Istio community are actively involved with these projects as well. It can be installed with Helm, and integrations exist for many other CNCF projects including Knative, Flagger, Jaeger, Open Policy Agent, and OpenTelemetry. We think that bringing Istio to the CNCF will help accelerate the feedback, feature, and development cycle of not just Istio, but also its partner projects.

Please see the project proposal document for further details.