Istio 1.1 – The Enterprise Ready Service Mesh

By Samir Behara on March 20, 2019 • ( 0 )

Back in July 31, 2018 – Istio 1.0 was released indicating that all the core features were ready for Production use. The growth of Istio has been tremendous over the last 8 months and has seen wider adoption from a number of organizations.

Istio is the industry leader in Service Mesh technology and is supported by the leading cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP. You can basically view Istio as a configurable infrastructure layer for your microservices architecture. Istio solves complex requirements while not requiring changes to application code of your microservices. It reduces the complexity of running a distributed microservice architecture. It is Platform Independent and Language Agnostic – so it does not matter which language you use to containerize your application.

Yesterday Istio 1.1 was released which primary focuses on addressing the performance and scalability issues which organizations bumped into running large clusters in Production environment. There are a number of improvements to both the Data Plane & Control Plane to make it more efficient and also significant improvements to the overall product.

Another big day for #Istio contributors and community! Istio is now version 1.1 and enterprise-ready. Details on the blog – https://t.co/C6v0XBt0RS

— Istio (@IstioMesh) March 19, 2019

You can read about the details on the Istio blog –

Announcing Istio 1.1

Performance summary for Istio 1.1

I have been using Istio 1.0 for my projects at work, and I am sure we will be upgrading to leverage the new Istio 1.1 version very soon.

Please find below information on required changes that you should be aware of while upgrading Istio from 1.0 to 1.1 — Istio Upgrade Guidelines

The documentation does mention that the upgrade process may install new binaries and may change configuration and API schemas. The upgrade process may result in service downtime. To minimize downtime, please ensure your Istio control plane components and your applications are highly available with multiple replicas.

I will be sharing my experiences on the upgrade process soon. For now have a fun time exploring the newly added enhancements to the Istio 1.1 version. Cheers.