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InfoQ Homepage News Istio 1.8 Announces Smart DNS Proxy, Support for Helm 3

Istio 1.8 Announces Smart DNS Proxy, Support for Helm 3

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Istio, an open-source service mesh platform, recently announced the release of Istio 1.8. The fourth and final release for 2020, this release focused on support for multi-cluster meshes and virtual machine (VM) workloads.

A blog post provided highlights of Istio 1.8, emphasizing the community’s focus on their 2020 roadmap. This release provides the official support for installing Istio with Helm 3. Currently an alpha release, the Helm charts are to be used when installing Istio using istioctl and Operator. With Helm, version 1.8 also supports both in-place upgrades and canary deployment of new control planes.

To install a mesh that spans multiple clusters, the 1.8 release has added a new installation guide. Aiming to eliminate the manual work, this guide provides options if the requirement is to run various control planes or multiple clusters on the same network.

For resolving Kubernetes services and service entries in the cluster from the virtual machines, Istio 1.8 has introduced a smart DNS proxying feature. This feature will enable DNS queries from an application to be intercepted by an Istio proxy in a pod or VM that intelligently responds to DNS query requests.

As a part of the VM Auto registration feature, a new WorkLoadGroup resource is introduced, which automatically creates the WorkLoadEntry resources when new VMs are available. This feature is in pre-alpha with Istio 1.8.

With Kubernetes 1.18, there is a certification signing request (CSR) API feature, which allows for automation of certificate request and retrieval from certification authorities. Istio 1.8 utilizes the API and ships an out-of the box Certificate Authority (CA). Istiod acts as the Registration Authority to manage updates for a CSR resource.

This release has also introduced a bug reporting feature istioctl bug-report, which can provide debug information and cluster status. With Istio 1.8, one can refer to pods indirectly by using istioctl dashboard envoy deployment/productpage.

In regards to deprecations, Mixer component has been removed in 1.8. Other minor updates include istioctl analyze, which can show cluster errors, returning the exact line number of the error.

The Tech community has welcomed the Istio 1.8, as one of the Twitter users Nico Meisenzahl tweeted, "In my view, #Istio 1.8 is the best release out of Istio community..."

Another Twitter user Sean Muller tweeted, "Although mired in controversy around the licensing model Google is using, Istio 1.8 adds some very significant enterprise improvements to Service Mesh."

Istio has encouraged the community's feedback by joining the conversation on Slack, or Discuss Istio forum. As of this writing, Istio has also released the minor update 1.8.1 to improve robustness.

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