The service mesh Istio has officially applied to become a part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). 

Istio is the most popular service mesh according to a recent CNCF survey. The project maintainers have stated they’re excited about this move and to work with the CNCF community on service mesh and networking. 

“Istio is the building block for products by over 20 different vendors. No other service mesh has a comparable footprint. We want to thank all the clouds, technology enterprises, startups and everyone else who has built a product based on Istio, or who makes Istio available with their hosted Kubernetes service. We look forward to our continued collaboration,” the Istio Steering Committee wrote in a blog post

The project is being donated by Google, which is one of the creators of the project along with IBM and Lyft. The first version launched in May 2017 and set the standard for service meshes. 

Google currently provides funding and management for Istio’s build and test infrastructure and will continue to provide this support as it makes the transition. Once the transition is complete it will provide support in the form of credits from Google. 

The project maintainers have also stated that the current governance model will stay the same during the move. “We will continue to reward corporate contribution, community influence and long-term maintainership through our Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee model,” the Istio Steering Committee wrote.