Google and the Istio Steering Committee have submitted the Istio project for consideration as an incubating project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Google originated the Istio project, which alongside Kubernetes and Knative, is a critical part of cloud-native infrastructure. The Istio project has found success and maturity in its current model — being adopted by hundreds of organizations and bringing in over 4,000 developers for IstioCon.

“Istio is key to the future of Google Cloud and if the project is accepted, Google will continue to strategically invest in Istio as a key maintainer and through ongoing investment in engineering for upstream contributions,” Google VP of Engineering Chen Goldberg said in a blog post.

Istio extends Kubernetes to establish a programmable, application-aware network using the Envoy service proxy. Istio works with both Kubernetes-based and traditional workloads, and brings standard, universal traffic management, telemetry, and security to complex deployments.

Istio is now offered as a managed or hosted service by over 20 providers, including Anthos Service Mesh, a suite of tools that helps you monitor and manage a reliable service mesh on-premises or on Google Cloud. According to the company, finding a home in the CNCF brings Istio closer to the cloud-native ecosystem and will foster continuing open innovation.