On April 25, Google Cloud’s official blog announced that the lstio open source project, which is about to celebrate its 5th birthday, has been submitted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for consideration as an incubation project.
At the beginning of March 2022, CNCF officially accepted the donation of the Knative open source project. As a mature project, donating lstio to CNCF will help to speed up feedback, functions and development cycles. lstio will be more widely applied to the cloud native model and become an ecological The main driving force in the system.
what is lstio?
Like Kubernetes and Knative, lstio is also an application in cloud native infrastructure project. It is an open source service mesh that provides a unified, efficient and transparent way to protect, connect and monitor services in cloud native applications. . It supports zero-trust networking, policy enforcement, traffic management, load balancing, and monitoring; all without rewriting applications.
Istio also extends Kubernetes to leverage Envoy service proxies to build a configurable, application-aware network. It can manage cloud-native and traditional workloads, supporting anything from a single cluster to complex multi-network deployments.
With open source support, the project has established a sound governance structure to promote user participation and continuous contributions to the project.
- Lstio open source address: https://github.com/istio/istio
lstio has been adopted by hundreds of institutions, bringing over 4000 developers to lstioCon. It also extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the Envoy service proxy. Istio works with Kubernetes-based and traditional workloads and brings standard, common traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments.
Istio, which makes its home at CNCF, will be closer to the cloud-native ecosystem and will foster continuous open innovation.
The development history of lstio
In 2016, Google worked with IBM and Lyft teams to develop lstio, which is based on a model for connecting Google's production applications. At the time, Google's security focus was complementary to IBM's open source traffic management platform, so the two decided to collaborate on lstio. In May 2017, lstion was "fully formed", and version 0.1 has the flow control, observability and policy features that are required to define a service mesh today.
When the lstio 0.3 version was released a few months later, there were already users using it in production environments. Version 1.0, which came out in 2018, has been used on a large scale by eBay and The Weather Company. In version 1.5, Google made some major revisions to unify the control plane into a single service, thereby reducing management overhead. This functional improvement was also written in the IEEE Software Journal. Additionally, by building support for WebAssembly plugins in Envoy, the extensibility of the grid is greatly simplified.
Istio is now managed or hosted by more than 20 vendors, including Anthos Service Mesh, a suite of tools that help users monitor and manage a reliable mesh of services on-premises or on Google Cloud.
What will happen to lstio after donation?
According to CNCF DevStats, Google contributes more than half of Istio and makes two-thirds of commits. After deciding to adopt Envoy for Istio, Google became the number one contributor to Envoy.
Istio is a component developed on the shoulders of several CNCF projects, such as Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, Prometheus, and SPIFFE, and many contributors to the Istio community are actively involved in these projects. As the last major component in the K8s ecosystem outside of CNCF, its API is very consistent with K8s. Joining CNCF's lstio will make the cloud native stack more complete and closer to the K8s project. Joining the CNCF will also make it easier for contributors and customers to demonstrate that support and governance meet the standards of other key cloud-native projects.
Istio is key to the future of Google Cloud, and if the project is accepted by the CNCF, Google will also continue to make strategic investments in Istio as the primary maintainer and through continued investment in upstream contributed engineering.
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