In a change of strategy, Google has finally submitted its Istio project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for consideration as an incubation project.

Google announced the news today at IstioCon where Eric Brewer, VP of infrastructure at Google, said during a keynote that as part of the move, Istio and its trademark will be managed like the Kubernetes project and its trademark, which will allow for “less risk for the broad community and a more truly open ecosystem.”

Initially, Google had submitted the project to the Open Usage Commons (OUC) group rather than donate the project to the CNCF — an unwelcome decision for the industry and some of the project’s developers, and one that caused a slowdown in development due to licensing issues. But the CNCF submission may have righted the ship because that organization is home to Istio’s companion projects Kubernetes and Envoy.

Brewer said that taking Istio to the CNCF now, “is the right time, in some sense, because there's been a lot of changes in Istio over the last several years, version 1.5, for example, made some tremendous changes in re-architecture, and it feels like it's in a great spot and works well.”

With regard to the OUC, a spokesperson for Google told SDxCentral, "The OUC is in operation and supports Angular and Gerrit Code Review. Google has approached the OUC and asked them to donate the Istio trademark to the Linux Foundation. The OUC has agreed to do so. As part of the contribution, in this case, the trademark will be transferred."

For its part, Istio’s Steering Committee cheered the decision in a blog: “It is almost 5 years since Google, IBM, and Lyft launched Istio 0.1 in May 2017. That first version set the standard for what a service mesh should be: traffic management, policy enforcement, and observability powered by sidecars next to workloads. We’re proud to be the most popular service mesh according to a recent CNCF survey, and look forward to working closer with the CNCF communities around networking and service mesh.” 

The committee’s blog continued: “As we deepen our integration with Kubernetes through the Gateway API and gRPC with proxyless mesh — not to mention Envoy, which has grown up beside Istio — we think it’s time to unite the premier cloud native stack under a single umbrella."

Along with Kubernetes and Knative, Istio is a key part of the cloud native infrastructure.

IBM welcomed the decision on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/IBMDeveloper/status/1518638409954304001

Idit Levine, founder and CEO of Solo.io, which builds on open source Envoy Proxy and Istio, said of the news, “The explosion in adoption of enterprise service mesh technologies proves the shift to microservices is accelerating. In the same way Kubernetes has become the industry standard for container orchestration, Istio has become the Kubernetes of service mesh. In joining the CNCF, Istio became the de facto standard in this space.”

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee will consider the application and perform due diligence. After that, they’ll open up for a vote, and if successful, the project will be transferred, according to a blog from Chen Goldberg, VP of engineering for Google.

This story was updated on April 25, 2022, at 1:35 p.m. Mountain Time.