Istio applies to join the CNCF

What's new with Kubernetes this month? In this post, we talk about Istio joining the CNCF, KubeVirt moving to the incubation phase, and what’s going on at some of the big conferences online and across the world.

Read on for the full story!

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Five years after launching, Istio is finally joining the CNCF. Well, they’ve applied to join, but it’s really just a formality - they’ll definitely get in. 

Istio is the biggest and most widely used service mesh, and the fact it hasn’t been a CNCF project has been a real pain for some. In fact, there have been some well-documented cases of large users having to choose alternatives, purely because of the lack of an open governance system.

Assuming it goes ahead, and Istio is welcomed into the CNCF, all those open governance and project ownership concerns will soon be forgotten, opening it up for more adoption. This is a good thing for the project and most of the community, but it might not be the best for other service meshes. 

Some service meshes have made a big deal about Google wanting to keep control. But if that’s not going to be an issue, where does it leave the competition? It’s possible some might take a hit on adoption and contributor numbers. 

So the main question is why join the CNCF now? 

There are a ton of reasons, but here’s what I think are the most important. First up, there’s always been pressure simply due to the fact it’s been the only major cloud native technology not to be part of the CNCF.  

Also, the vast majority of commits and support have been from Google. So this might open it up to wider community support and more contributors. Which can only mean good things on the feature and stability front. 

In a nutshell, this is a huge deal in the service mesh space! 

Hot on the heels of Knative being accepted as a CNCF incubating project in March 2022, the KubeVirt project has also moved into the incubating stage of the CNCF. 

KubeVirt enables users to run VM workloads on Kubernetes. And it’s not just about migrating legacy virtual machines because, believe it or not, people are still deploying apps to VMs, meaning they’re most-definitely still relevant. 

KubeVirt was accepted as a Sandbox project in 2019, and not quite 3 years later it’s a flourishing project, moving on to the incubation phase.  

Since it began, KubeVirt has had over 20 releases, with more than 300 contributors from over 130 companies. It’s got real-world production implementations all across the globe, including notable ones at places like Arm and CIVO. 

On the technology front, it’s been full-steam ahead as well. Things like live migrations, online snaps, SR-IOV, and even GPUs are supported. As are non-disruptive upgrades of the control plane. So it's a feature-packed solution! 

If you’ve got apps that are a combo of VMs and containers, KubeVirt on Kubernetes gives you an epic platform. Got some serverless event driven stuff as well? Then just mix in a bit of Knative.   

This news goes to show that Kubernetes is the platform of choice for modern workloads. 

And last but not least for this month - conferences.  

IstioCon has been and gone, but some of the sessions from IstioCon are already up and available to watch. So if you missed it a couple of weeks ago, go check out the sessions available to stream. 

A new event called PlatformCon is scheduled for June 2022. It’s free, 100% virtual, and some of the sessions look really cool. I’ve already bookmarked “Why it's different this time: Kubernetes as the cloud operating system of the next fifty years” by Natan Yellin. And “Virtual clusters for Kubernetes: use cases” by Rich Burroughs. 

Finally, it’s almost time for KubeCon in Valencia. If you’re going, be sure to come and say hi. I’ll be there in person! 

For news around Kubernetes this month, check out the video above. Stay safe, and I’ll see you all again next month — same Kube time, same Kube place.

Want to keep up with all things Kubernetes? Follow Nigel on Twitter or keep up with him here. Subscribe to A Cloud Guru on YouTube for regular updates, analysis, and assorted awesomeness. You can also like ACG on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or join the conversation on Discord!

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