Istio 1.7’s new features were built to make Istio easier to operate and to expand its capabilities for hybrid cloud environments.
This includes multiple control plane upgrades such as the canary upgrade that enables users to verify a new control plane using continuous integration and Istio’s telemetry features. Once a portion of the workloads are verified, more workloads can be transferred until all are running using the new Istio control plane.
The release also pushes virtual machine integration to beta quality. The new WorkloadEntry API in Istio 1.7 treats VMs like Kubernetes pods, so users can manage their infrastructure with APIs. New security enhancements include token bootstrapping and certificate rotation.
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Meanwhile, IBM said that Central Istiod reached alpha quality in Istio 1.7, allowing users to decouple the Istio control plane from the data plane for improved operational support. In addition, Central Istiod delivers on the requirement of multitenancy and is the first step towards the multitenancy journey for Istio.
Some other improvements in Istio 1.7 include testing and qualification improvements, which produces a better project deliverable each release; the move to Envoy xDSv3, the underlying API that presents a dataplane protocol that Istio manages; and Istio’s new Container Network Interface.
“One of the biggest challenges for delivering a hybrid cloud environment is the requirement to connect different environments together using network technology. IBM Cloud Satellite enables you to run workloads where it makes the most sense — whether that’s public cloud, your data center or an edge location,” IBM wrote in a post that contains additional details on the new release.
