Google donates the Istio service mesh to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) will be receiving the Istio service mesh project from Google.

Knative, a project that aims to make it easier to build and deploy serverless applications on top of Kubernetes, was brought to the CNCF by the company. Istio will likely become a CNCF project. There are still some steps to be taken before that happens, but chances are that if those weren't there, it wouldn't happen.

In today's announcement, Chen Goldberg wrote that for over 20 years, Google has helped shape the future of computing with its open source contributions. Istio brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployment. Istio will be closer to the cloud-native community if it finds a home in the CNCF.

Service meshes are often a fundamental technology for managing large container deployment, even though they don't seem like the most exciting of projects. The idea is to have a tool that can manage all of the messaging between services, which can quickly become difficult in a system where machines are ephemeral.

The foundation is already home to one service mesh project, but it has played host to other projects.

version 1.5 of Istio was launched in the year. Vendors start looking for a foundation for their open-source project at that point. The Istio team launched a re-architected version of the software with the launch of version 1.5, which puzzled a few pundits.

Half of all contributions to Istio have been made by Google.

Istio is the last major component of organizations, and it is well-aligned to Kubernetes. It is easier for contributors and customers to demonstrate support and governance in line with the standards of other critical cloud-native projects if they join the CNCF.

IBM, which contributed to Istio and previously wasn't a fan of how Google handled the project, is adding to the complaints by not donating it to a larger foundation. The logical home for Istio is the CNCF.

IBM believes in open governance and community. We enthusiastically applaud today's submission of Istio to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Google, IBM and Lyft launch Istio, an open-source platform for managing and securing microservices

Knative becomes a CNCF project