The open source Istio service mesh project is hitting a major milestone today as it officially graduates to be a full project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Istio describes a service mesh as “a dedicated infrastructure layer that you can add to your applications. It allows you to transparently add capabilities like observability, traffic management, and security, without adding them to your own code.”

Graduation at the CNCF is an indication of the maturity, usefulness, contribution and production-grade quality of a project, which are all check boxes that Istio arguably achieved years ago. Istio was originally started by Google in 2017, where it remained until April 2022 despite repeated calls from users and other vendors for the project to be contributed to a neutral third-party organization. That organization is the CNCF, which is also home to the open source Kubernetes container orchestration project that is routinely the primary way that Istio is deployed.

"It is certainly true that Istio is very mature," Craig Box, Istio Steering Committee member and VP of Open Source and Community at ARMO, told SDxCentral. "We were able to demonstrate that fact to the CNCF’s TOC [Technical Oversight Committee], making the applications for both incubation and graduation happen relatively quickly."Box explained that CNCF graduation is a signal from a widely respected and independent industry body that the project has met a broad set of maturity benchmarks. He noted that the CNCF derives its strength from the developer and practitioner community on which it is based, but the CNCF still needs to inform executive sponsors about risk when making decisions about critical infrastructure. Istio's graduation is meaningful to these conversations, he said.

There are some good reasons why it took so long for Istio to make it to the CNCF and some very concrete benefits as a result.

Louis Ryan, Solo.io CTO and co-creator of Istio, told SDxCentral that since Kubernetes and Istio are like peanut butter and jelly. The fact that they had different governance gave some folks pause. As such aligning and fixing the governance model was a primary consideration.

"By incubating the project within the CNCF over the last year, the project has seen rapid growth in the contributor community," Ryan said. "During the CNCF’s incubation phase, numerous developers, experts and users participated in its development, providing valuable feedback, code contributions and bug fixes. "

One concrete result highlighted by Ryan is the collaboration with Microsoft, which recently announced Istio support. It has also helped with broader industry collaboration such as the GAMMA initiative in Kubernetes to create better API standards for service mesh.

Both Box and Ryan highlight the Ambient Mesh' effort, which launched in 2022 as representing the future of service mesh for most users.

Ambient Mesh is now available as an alpha release .

To date the Istio service mesh has taken an approach known as a sidecar container, where a separate container is deployed alongside an application container to enable the service mesh.  Ryan  noted that the sidecar-based mode of Istio has provided a lot of value for users. That said, he explained that the ambient mesh project is born out of our desire to remove any objections to adoption for small and large users.

“It is significantly easier to adopt and maintain and represents a huge cost reduction,” Ryan said. “ We called the effort ‘ambient’ because we think mesh should be part of your infrastructure furniture, something that’s always there giving value.’