As we acknowledge Istio's graduation to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it's important to note that it’s not just a momentous occasion for Istio, but for the entire cloud native community. This milestone marks a significant growth trajectory for Istio and paves the way for future innovation and success in the years to come.
In the realm of microservices, the significance of Istio's role cannot be overstated. Istio simplifies microservice management by providing an easy way to observe, connect, and secure services, all without altering the underlying code. It has garnered global recognition and has been adopted as the preferred service mesh by nearly half of the Fortune 2000 companies.
The journey of Istio into the CNCF ecosystem began just over four years ago, overcoming initial hurdles related to product maturity and production adoption. Today, Istio's reliability and growing usage have secured its place within the CNCF. Thanks to the support of robust cloud native projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, and Prometheus, Istio has now been warmly embraced by the CNCF community.
Through VMware Tanzu Service Mesh, VMware has been consistent in its support for Istio, underscoring an ongoing commitment to the cloud native ecosystem. Today, Tanzu Service Mesh stands as a versatile managed Istio service, functioning across various Kubernetes distributions and clouds, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and others. This commitment to Istio helps foster a more efficient and scalable cloud native ecosystem.
With Tanzu Service Mesh, we aim to deliver a robust and flexible managed Istio service across various platforms and environments. We have accomplished this by implementing unique abstractions on top of Istio, such as global namespaces, while maintaining Istio's integrity without altering it.
At VMware, we see the immense potential this holds. Our firm commitment to Istio and the broader cloud native ecosystem is stronger than ever. Our goal is to continue innovating and evolving the VMware Tanzu suite of products and services, including Tanzu Service Mesh, while maintaining a customer-centric focus to ensure we deliver efficient and secure service mesh solutions.
Looking ahead, Istio has strengthened its position as a leading service mesh within the Kubernetes ecosystem. We encourage you to join the Istio community to learn more about contributing to Istio. Participate in discussions, answer questions on Slack, triage issues, or submit pull requests to help resolve issues. This is indeed an exciting time for the Istio project, and we're thrilled to see where the journey leads next.
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