Istio 1.18.0 Change Notes

Istio 1.18.0 change notes.

Jun 7, 2023

Deprecation Notices

These notices describe functionality that will be removed in a future release according to Istio’s deprecation policy. Please consider upgrading your environment to remove the deprecated functionality.

There are no new deprecations in Istio 1.18.0

Traffic Management

Improved Gateway API Automated Deployment management logic. See Upgrade Notes for more information.
Updated the VirtualService validation to fail on empty prefix header matcher. (Issue #44424)
Updated ProxyConfig resources with workload selector will be applied to Kubernetes Gateway pods only if the specified label is istio.io/gateway-name. Other labels are ignored.
Added provision to provide overridden/explicit value for failoverPriority label. This provided value is used while assigning priority for endpoints instead of the client’s value. (Issue #39111)
Added prefix matching on query parameter. (Issue #43710)
Added health checks for those VMs that are not using auto-registration. (Issue #44712)
Fixed admission webhook fails with custom header value format. (Issue #42749)
Fixed fixed bug of Istio cannot be deployed on IPv6-first DS clusters for Dual Stack support in Istio. (Optimized Design)(Original Design) (Issue #40394)(Issue #41462)
Fixed an issue where EnvoyFilter for Cluster.ConnectTimeout was affecting unrelated Clusters. (Issue #43435)
Fixed reporting Programmed condition on Gateway API Gateway resources. (Issue #43498)
Fixed an issue that when there are different Binds specified in the Gateways with the same port and different protocols, listeners are not generated correctly. (Issue #43688)
Fixed an issue that when there are different Binds specified in the Gateways with the same port and TCP protocol, listeners are not generated correctly. (Issue #43775)
Fixed an issue with service entry deletion not deleting the corresponding endpoints in some cases. (Issue #43853)
Fixed an issue where auto allocated service entry IPs change on host reuse. (Issue #43858)
Fixed WorkloadEntry resources never being cleaned up if multiple WorkloadEntries were auto-registered with the same IP and network. (Issue #43950)
Fixed the dns_upstream_failures_total metric was mistakenly deleted in the previous release. (Issue #44151)
Fixed an issue where ServiceEntry and Service had undefined or empty workload selectors. If the workload selector is undefined or empty, ServiceEntry and Service should not select any WorkloadEntry or endpoint.
Fixed An issue where a Service Entry configured with partial wildcard hosts generates a warning during validation as the config can some times generate invalid server name match. (Issue #44195)
Fixed an issue where Istio Gateway (Envoy) would crash due to a duplicate istio_authn network filter in the Envoy filter chain. (Issue #44385)
Fixed a bug where services are missing in gateways if PILOT_FILTER_GATEWAY_CLUSTER_CONFIG is enabled. (Issue #44439)
Fixed CPU usage abnormally high when cert specified by DestinationRule are invalid. (Issue #44986)
Fixed an issue where changing a label on a workload instance with a previously matched ServiceEntry would not properly get removed. (Issue #42921)
Fixed istiod not reconciling k8s gateway deployments and services when they are changed. (Issue #43332)
Fixed an issue where istiod does not retry resolving east-west gateway hostnames on failure. (Issue #44155)
Fixed an issue where istiod generates incorrect endpoints when it fails to resolve east-west gateway hostnames. (Issue #44155)
Fixed an issue where sidecars do not proxy DNS properly for a hostname backed by multiple services. (Issue #43152)
Fixed an issue where updating Service ExternalName does not take effect. (Issue #43440)
Fixed an issue causing VMs using auto-registration to ignore labels other than those defined in a WorkloadGroup. (Issue #32210)
Upgraded the gateway-api integration to read v1beta1 resources for ReferenceGrant, Gateway, and GatewayClass. Users of the gateway-api must be on v0.6.0+ before upgrading Istio. istioctl x precheck can detect this issue before upgrading.
Removed support for proxy.istio.io/config annotation applied to Kubernetes Gateway pods.
Removed support for Ingress version networking.k8s.io/v1beta1. The v1 version has been available since Kubernetes 1.19.
Removed alpha Gateway API types by default. They can be explicitly re-enabled with PILOT_ENABLE_ALPHA_GATEWAY_API=true.
Removed the experimental “taint controller” for Istio CNI.
Removed support for EndpointSlice version discovery.k8s.io/v1beta1. The v1 version has been available since Kubernetes 1.21. EndpointSlice v1 is automatically used on Kubernetes 1.21+, while Endpoints is used on older versions. This change only impacts users explicitly enabling PILOT_USE_ENDPOINT_SLICE on Kubernetes versions older than 1.21, which is no longer supported.
Removed deprecated and unsupported status conditions Ready, Scheduled, and Detached from Gateway API.

Security

Added --profiling flag to allow enabling or disabling profiling on pilot-agent status port. (Issue #41457)
Added support for pushing additional federated trust domains from caCertificates to the peer SAN validator. (Issue #41666)
Added support for using P384 curves when using ECDSA (PR #44459)
Added ecdh_curves support for non ISTIO_MUTUAL traffic through MeshConfig API. (Issue #41645)
Enabled the AUTO_RELOAD_PLUGIN_CERTS env var by default for istiod to notice cacerts file changes in common cases (e.g. reload intermediate certs). (Issue #43104)
Fixed ignoring default CA certificate when PeerCertificateVerifier is created.
Fixed issue with metadata handling for Azure platform. Support added for tagsList serialization of tags on instance metadata. (Issue #31176)
Fixed an issue where RBAC updates were not sent to older proxies after upgrading istiod to 1.17. (Issue #43785)
Fixed handling of remote SPIFFE trust bundles containing multiple certs. (Issue #44831)
Removed support for the certificates field in MeshConfig. This was deprecated in 1.15, and does not work on Kubernetes 1.22+. (Issue #36231)

Telemetry

Added support to control trace id length on Zipkin tracing provider. (Issue #43359)
Added support for METADATA command operator in access log. (Issue #44074)
Added metric expiry support, when env flags METRIC_ROTATION_INTERVAL and METRIC_GRACEFUL_DELETION_INTERVAL are enabled.
Fixed an issue where you could not disable tracing in ProxyConfig. (Issue #31809)
Fixed an issue where ALL_METRICS does not disable metrics as expected. (PR #43179)
Fixed a bug that would cause unexpected behavior when applying access logging configuration based on the direction of traffic. With this fix, access logging configuration for CLIENT or SERVER will not affect each other.
Fixed pilot has an additional invalid gateway metric that was not created by the user.
Fixed an issue where grpc stats are absent. (Issue #43908), (Issue #44144)

Installation

Improved istioctl operator remove command to run without the confirmation in the dry-run mode. (PR #43120)
Improved the downloadIstioCtl.sh script to not change to the home directory at the end. (Issue #43771)
Improved the default telemetry installation to configure meshConfig.defaultProviders instead of custom EnvoyFilters when advanced customizations are not used, improving performance.
Updated the proxies concurrency configuration to always be detected based on CPU limits, unless explicitly configured. See upgrade notes for more info. (PR #43865)
Updated Kiali addon to version v1.67.0. (PR #44498)
Added env variables to support modifying grpc keepalive values. (Issue #43256)
Added support for scraping metrics in dual stack clusters. (Issue #35915)
Added make inbound port configurable. (Issue #43655)
Added injection of istio.io/rev annotation to sidecars and gateways for multi-revision observability.
Added an automatically set GOMEMLIMIT to istiod to reduce the risk of out-of-memory issues. (Issue #40676)
Added support for labels to be added to the Gateway pod template via .Values.labels. (Issue #41057), (Issue #43585)
Added check to limit the clusterrole for k8s CSR permissions for external CA usecases by verifying .Values.pilot.env.EXTERNAL_CA and .Values.global.pilotCertProvider parameters.
Added configurable node affinity to istio-cni values.yaml. Can be used to allow excluding istio-cni from being scheduled on specific nodes.
Fixed SELinux issue on CentOS9/RHEL9 where iptables-restore isn’t allowed to open files in /tmp. Rules passed to iptables-restore are no longer written to a file, but are passed via stdin. (Issue #42485)
Fixed an issue where webhook configuration was being modified in dry-run mode when installing Istio with istioctl. (PR #44345)
Removed injecting label istio.io/rev to gateways to avoid creating pods indefinitely when istio.io/rev=<tag>. (Issue #33237)
Removed operator skip reconcile for iop resources with names starting with installed-state. It now relies solely on the annotation install.istio.io/ignoreReconcile. This won’t affect the behavior of istioctl install. (Issue #29394)
Removed kustomization.yaml and pre-generated installation manifests (gen-istio.yaml, etc) from published releases. These previously installed unsupported testing images, which led to accidental usage by users and tools such as Argo CD.

istioctl

Improved the istioctl pc secret output to display the certificate serial number in HEX. (Issue #43765)
Improved the istioctl analyze to output mismatched proxy image messages as IST0158 on namespace level instead of IST0105 on pod level, which is more succinct.
Added istioctl analyze will display a error when encountering two additional erroneous Telemetry scenarios. (Issue #43705)
Added --output-dir flag to specify the output directory for the bug-report command’s generated archive file. (Issue #43842)
Added credential validation when using istioctl analyze to validate the secrets specified with credentialName in Gateway resources. (Issue #43891)
Added an analyzer for showing warning messages when the deprecated lightstep provider is still being used. (Issue #40027)
Added istiod metrics to bug-report, and a few more debug points like telemetryz. (Issue #44062)
Added a “VHOST NAME” column to the output of istioctl pc route. (Issue #44413)
Added local flags --ui-port for different istioctl dashboard commands to allow users to specify the component UI port to use for the dashboard.
Fixed Server Side Apply is enabled by default for Kubernetes cluster versions above 1.22 or be detected if it can be run in Kubernetes versions 1.18-1.21.
Fixed istioctl install --set <boolvar>=<bool> and istioctl manifests generate --set <boolvar>=<bool> improperly converting a boolean into a string. (Issue #43355)
Fixed istioctl experimental describe not showing all weighted routes when the VirtualService is defined to split traffic across multiple services. (Issue #43368)
Fixed istioctl x precheck displays unwanted IST0136 messages which are set by Istio as default. (Issue #36860)
Fixed a bug in istioctl analyze where some messages are missed when there are services with no selector in the analyzed namespace.
Fixed resource namespace resolution for istioctl commands.
Fixed an issue where specifying the directory for temporary artifacts with --dir when using istioctl bug-report did not work. (Issue #43835)
Fixed istioctl experimental revision describe warning gateway is not enabled when gateway exists. (Issue #44002)
Fixed istioctl experimental revision describe has incorrect number of egress gateways. (Issue #44002)
Fixed inaccuracies in analysis results when analyzing configuration files with empty content.
Fixed istioctl analyze no longer expects pods and runtime resources when analyzing files. (Issue #40861)
Fixed istioctl analyze to prevent panic when the server port in Gateway is nil. (Issue #44318)
Fixed the istioctl experimental revision list REQD-COMPONENTS column data being incomplete and general output format.
Fixed istioctl operator remove cannot remove the operator controller due to a no Deployment detected error. (Issue #43659)
Fixed istioctl verify-install fails when using multiple iops. (Issue #42964)
Fixed istioctl experimental wait has undecipherable message when PILOT_ENABLE_CONFIG_DISTRIBUTION_TRACKING is not enabled. (PR #43023)