Lucien Avramov and Niran Evenchen co-wrote this post.
Today, Google submitted Istio to be considered as an incubating project with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), starting the process of handing off management of the project to the CNCF. In tandem with this announcement, we are introducing Istio Mode for VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, reinforcing our support and commitment to open source Istio.
“We are very excited about this new phase of the Istio project and believe it will allow for a more open and dynamic innovation model,” said Pere Monclus, vice president and chief technology officer at VMware.
"It's great to see that Tanzu Service Mesh is based on Istio and its APIs. This is strong validation of the success of the Istio project and reinforces VMware's commitment to it and to the overall cloud native ecosystem," added Louis Ryan, principal engineer at Google and Istio co-founder.
Istio is a service networking layer that provides a transparent and language-independent way to flexibly and easily automate application network functions. It’s a solution for managing the different microservices that make up a cloud native application.
VMware Tanzu Service Mesh has incorporated Istio since its release. It offers a fully managed Istio on any Kubernetes distribution on any cloud, specifically with our concept of global namespaces (GNS). Learn more about using global namespaces with Tanzu Service Mesh.
With Istio Mode, operators can interact directly with the open source Istio deployment on their clusters while using Tanzu Service Mesh for its lifecycle management, observability, and more.
Istio Mode provides the following capabilities to Tanzu Service Mesh:
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Istio API direct access for Istio features and configurations
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Federated Istio deployment lifecycle from onboarding, deployment, and upgrades of Istio on any Kubernetes managed cluster, in any cloud
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Observability for Istio that includes topology maps, inventory, heatmaps, golden metrics, and more
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Technical support services for open source Istio included as part of Tanzu Service Mesh support
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Operators using Istio Mode in Tanzu Service Mesh can also purchase Tanzu Labs professional services to help them be successful in implementing and using service mesh
Istio Mode is available today to all Tanzu Service Mesh operators with their current subscription, no matter which edition they use, and provides a choice as to how to start their journey into using service mesh technology with open source Istio.
For more information about this announcement, see Google's blog post. Learn more about Tanzu Service Mesh and Istio.
