Request to extend Istio 1.4 support

I understand that 1.4 hit EOL recently due to the Istio support policy: https://istio.io/news/support/announcing-1.4-eol/

However due to the circumstances around the migration path away from the helm install, I don’t believe users have been given enough time to properly migrate. While 1.5 came out 3 months ago, an upgrade path with no downtime (canary control plane deployments) has only been available since May 21st. That means users had only 12 business days to migrate their production workloads. I’d like to request that the Istio team support 1.4 for one more release cycle due to the special circumstances.

Thank you.

Hi @cbron, can you elaborate more on your use case and how were you or your customers were using Istio in 1.4? Were you using Helm to perform in-place upgrades as canary/no downtime upgrades were not supported pre 1.6?

Correct, our pipeline only supports helm install and upgrade, so doing helm template; kubectl apply or using istioctl isn’t an option. We are still exploring how to approach 1.6 installations as no official helm chart exists past 1.4 (besides making them yourself from the manifests). I’m assuming many other istio customers are in a similar boat, as seen in the “Istio’s helm support in 2020” topic.

Even though in 1.6, Helm is not officially supported, we tried to keep it installable via Helm 3. I had written detailed instructions here.

In 1.7, we are planning to bring back Helm 3 support, if you can contribute in that effort that would be great. Thanks!

It’s good that official helm support will be coming back, but many places won’t bridge the gap between 1.4 and 1.7 until that is available. Right now 1.7 is slated for mid-August, meaning many Istio installations will not be getting security updates for many months.