Reconciliation

📋 Recommended Actions ✅ No Immediate Action Required No immediate action required. This release primarily provides stability and quality-of-life improvements. Review the updates to leverage enhanced certificate handling and improve your troubleshooting experience. 📝 Summary cert-manager(v1.18.3) boosts reliability and user experience. It now supports significantly larger certificates and chains, crucial for complex deployments with many SANs. A critical fix prevents unnecessary certificate re-issuance stemming from IssuerRef defaulting. Plus, clearer error messages for malformed PEM data greatly simplify troubleshooting. Upgrade for a more stable and robust certificate management experience. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate review is required due to security enhancements for Gateway API TLS secret access. Operations engineers should update to ensure gateways continue to function correctly, especially if relying on previous implicit permissions. Also, review the new ENABLE_PROXY_FIND_POD_BY_IP flag for potential future impacts. 📝 Summary Istio 1.26.5 delivers crucial security and stability enhancements. This release significantly hardens Kubernetes Gateway API TLS secret access, now requiring both namespace and service account matching for referenced secrets—a vital update for secure operations. You’ll also find improved installation flexibility as the Istio CNI no longer depends directly on Pilot, streamlining deployments. For ambient mode users, ServiceEntry named port mapping logic is now correctly aligned with sidecar behavior, resolving previous inconsistencies. Additionally, a new feature flag, ENABLE_PROXY_FIND_POD_BY_IP, grants more control over pod-proxy association, with future versions defaulting it to ‘off’. Critical bug fixes address issues like XDS cache corruption during SDS config dumps and Gateway API meshconfig reconciliation, ensuring a more robust and predictable service mesh. Review these updates promptly to maintain a secure and efficient Istio environment. ...