Istio, an open-source service mesh platform, recently announced the release of Istio 1.8. The fourth and final release for 2020, this release focused on support for multi-cluster meshes and virtual machine (VM) workloads.

A blog post provided highlights of Istio 1.8, emphasizing the community’s focus on their 2020 roadmap. This release provides the official support for installing Istio with Helm 3. Currently an alpha release, the Helm charts are to be used when installing Istio using istioctl and Operator. With Helm, version 1.8 also supports both in-place upgrades and canary deployment of new control planes.

To install a mesh that spans multiple clusters, the 1.8 release has added a new installation guide. Aiming to eliminate the manual work, this guide provides options if the requirement is to run various control planes or multiple clusters on the same network.

For resolving Kubernetes services and service entries in the cluster from the virtual machines, Istio 1.8 has introduced a smart DNS proxying feature. This feature will enable DNS queries from an application to be intercepted by an Istio proxy in a pod or VM that intelligently responds to DNS query requests.

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