1.7 release branch will be created next Tuesday 21st

Hi team,

This is a friendly reminder that next Tuesday (July 21st) we will cut the release branch for the upcoming 1.7 release.

If you have pending pull requests, make sure to get in touch with maintainers to get them reviewed and merged before that day.

Maintainers, please take a look at any PR’s that you would like to merge in time for 1.7.

After the branch is cut, any changes that should go into the 1.7 release will need to be cherry-picked from master to the release-1.7 branch. Note that this process is time-consuming and requires manual approval from 1.7 release managers for each cherry-pick.

Please see https://github.com/istio/istio/wiki/Istio-Release-1.7 for all details about the 1.7 release.

Thanks,
Jonh Wendell, on behalf of the 1.7 Release Managers.