Feature Status

This page lists the relative maturity and support level of every Istio feature. Please note that the phases (Alpha, Beta, and Stable) are applied to individual features within the project, not to the project as a whole. Here is a high level description of what these labels means:

Feature phase definitions

Alpha Beta Stable
Purpose Demo-able, works end-to-end but has limitations Usable in production, not a toy anymore Dependable, production hardened
API No guarantees on backward compatibility APIs are versioned Dependable, production-worthy. APIs are versioned, with automated version conversion for backward compatibility
Performance Not quantified or guaranteed Not quantified or guaranteed Performance (latency/scale) is quantified, documented, with guarantees against regression
Deprecation Policy None Weak - 3 months Dependable, Firm. 1 year notice will be provided before changes

Istio features

Below is our list of existing features and their current phases. This information will be updated after every monthly release.

Traffic management

Feature Phase
Protocols: HTTP 1.1 Beta
Protocols: HTTP 2.0 Alpha
Protocols: gRPC Alpha
Protocols: MongoDB Alpha
Request Routing Alpha
Fault Injection Alpha
Traffic Shifting Alpha
Circuit Break Alpha
Mirroring Alpha
Ingress Traffic Alpha
Egress Traffic Alpha
Egress TCP Traffic Alpha
Improved Routing Rules: Composite Service Alpha
Quota / Redis Rate Limiting (Adapter and Server) Alpha
Memquota Implementation and Integration Stable
Ingress TLS Alpha
Egress Policy and Telemetry Alpha

Observability

Feature Phase
Prometheus Integration Beta
Local Logging (STDIO) Stable
Statsd Integration Stable
Service Dashboard in Grafana Beta
Stackdriver Integration Alpha
Service Graph Alpha
Distributed Tracing to Zipkin / Jaeger Alpha
Istio Component Dashboard in Grafana Beta
Service Tracing Alpha
Logging with Fluentd Alpha

Security

Feature Phase
Deny Checker Stable
List Checker Stable
Kubernetes: Service Credential Distribution Stable
Pluggable Key/Cert Support for Istio CA Stable
Service-to-service mutual TLS Stable
Authentication policy Alpha
VM: Service Credential Distribution Beta
OPA Checker Alpha
RBAC Mixer Adapter Alpha

Core

Feature Phase
Kubernetes: Envoy Installation and Traffic Interception Beta
Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Installation Beta
Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Upgrade Beta
Pilot Integration into Kubernetes Service Discovery Stable
Attribute Expression Language Stable
Mixer Adapter Authoring Model Stable
VM: Envoy Installation, Traffic Interception and Service Registration Alpha
VM: Istio Control Plane Installation and Upgrade (Galley, Mixer, Pilot, CA) Alpha
VM: Ansible Envoy Installation, Interception and Registration Alpha
Pilot Integration into Consul Alpha
Pilot Integration into Eureka Alpha
Pilot Integration into Cloud Foundry Service Discovery Alpha
Basic Config Resource Validation Alpha
Mixer Telemetry Collection (Tracing, Logging, Monitoring) Alpha
Custom Mixer Build Model Alpha
Enable API attributes using an IDL Alpha
Helm Beta
Multicluster Mesh Alpha

Bulb Please get in touch by joining our community if there are features you'd like to see in our future releases!