istio(1.26.6): Crucial Proxy Updates for Enhanced Stability and Security

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate review and upgrade recommended to incorporate the latest proxy stability and potential security enhancements. 📝 Summary Istio 1.26.6 delivers a crucial stability and performance update. This patch primarily refreshes the underlying Envoy proxy, incorporating the latest fixes and improvements from the Envoy ‘release-1.26’ branch. While this is a focused update with no new features, it’s vital for ensuring your service mesh benefits from enhanced proxy robustness and potential upstream security patches. Operations engineers should review this release promptly and plan for a timely upgrade to maintain optimal performance and security posture. This release reinforces Istio’s foundation, ensuring your applications run on the most stable and secure proxy available in the 1.26 series. ...

October 20, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

istio(1.27.1): Gateway API Stability, mTLS Echo Support, and Key Bug Fixes

📋 Recommended Actions ✅ No Immediate Action Required No immediate action required. Review updates to better support your users, especially if you’re leveraging Kubernetes Gateway API or istioctl proxy-status. 📝 Summary Istio 1.27.1 delivers crucial bug fixes and valuable enhancements, bolstering operational stability and testing capabilities. This release notably improves Kubernetes Gateway API adoption by fixing a tag watcher issue that caused programming failures with revisioned installs. Users of istioctl proxy-status will find a more robust experience as its behavior when no proxies are found has been fixed to prevent breaking external tooling. We’ve also added comprehensive mTLS support to the Echo server, allowing for more detailed and accurate security testing. Core component reliability sees significant boosts with fixes for traffic policy validation (especially retry_budget) and improved istio-iptables logic that correctly handles IPv4/IPv6 states. Dependency updates ensure compatibility and security. These changes collectively enhance Istio’s stability and flexibility, making it even more dependable for your cloud-native deployments. ...

September 3, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

istio(1.26.1): Gateway API v1.3 Support, Enhanced CA Bundle Validation, and Istioctl Fixes

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Review your Gateway API configurations, particularly AllowedRoutes.namespaces.from settings, as None is no longer supported and will cause validation errors. For pluginca users, ensure your cacerts bundle is complete to avoid istiod startup failures due to new, stricter validation. Upgrading is recommended for improved stability and security hardening. 📝 Summary Istio 1.26.1 lands with crucial updates, primarily focusing on robust Gateway API integration and enhanced security. This release promotes Gateway API to v1.3.0, alongside a critical fix that resolves istiod panics when processing complex Gateway API hostnames. Notably, a breaking change from upstream Gateway API means AllowedRoutes.namespaces.from: None is no longer valid, requiring configuration updates. ...

May 29, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark