Istio releases version 1.13 of its service mesh platform

Istio has recently released version 1.13 of its service mesh platform. Traffic management and the telemetry API were improved.

Istio is a dedicated infrastructure layer — known as ‘service mesh’ — for distributed applications. In this case, the layer hosts applications based on Kubernetes.

The service mesh introduces traffic management, load balancing, observability, service-to-service authentication and monitoring. In this way, developers can secure, connect and monitor their services with little to no modification to underlying code.

Traffic management in v1.13

Version 1.13 adds new functionality for traffic management. Developers can now configure concurrency and proxy image types via the ProxyConfig custom resource configuration. They can also now set up hostname-based multi-network gateways for east-west traffic.

In addition, support was added for rewriting gRPC probes and listener balancing Envoy worker threads when using proxyMetadata. Also, the Istio agent learned to mimic Kubernetes’ probing method, meaning it no longer needs to reuse connections.

Telemetry API

Version 1.13 of Istio also improved the Telemetry API. This API has been available since version 1.11 and, among other things, allows Common Expression Language to specify whether requests or connections should be logged. Now, they can also determine whether to use the Open Telemetry project for logging.