---
title: Announcing Istio 1.1
linktitle: 1.1
subtitle: Major Update
description: Istio 1.1 release announcement.
publishdate: 2019-03-19
release: 1.1.0
skip_list: true
aliases:
    - /blog/2019/announcing-1.1
    - /news/2019/announcing-1.1
    - /news/announcing-1.1.0
    - /news/announcing-1.1
---

We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.1!

{{< relnote >}}

Since we released 1.0 back in July, we’ve done a lot of work to help people get
into production. Not surprisingly, we had to do some [patch releases](/news)
(6 so far!), but we’ve also been hard at work adding new features to the
product.

The theme for 1.1 is Enterprise Ready. We’ve been very pleased to see more and
more companies using Istio in production, but as some larger companies tried to
adopt Istio they hit some limits.

One of our prime areas of focus has been [performance and scalability](/docs/ops/deployment/performance-and-scalability/).
As people moved into production with larger clusters running more services at
higher volume, they hit some scaling and performance issues. The
[sidecars](/docs/concepts/traffic-management/#sidecars) took too many resources
and added too much latency. The control plane (especially
[Pilot](/docs/ops/deployment/architecture/#pilot)) was overly
resource hungry.

We’ve done a lot of work to make both the data plane and the control plane more
efficient. You can find the details of our 1.1 performance testing and the
results in our updated [performance ans scalability concept](/docs/ops/deployment/performance-and-scalability/).

We’ve done work around namespace isolation as well. This lets you use
Kubernetes namespaces to enforce boundaries of control, and ensures that your
teams cannot interfere with each other.

We have also improved the [multicluster capabilities and usability](/docs/ops/deployment/deployment-models/).
We listened to the community and improved defaults for traffic control and
policy. We introduced a new component called
[Galley](/docs/ops/deployment/architecture/#galley). Galley validates that sweet,
sweet YAML, reducing the chance of configuration errors. Galley will also be
instrumental in [multicluster setups](/docs/setup/install/multicluster/),
gathering service discovery information from each Kubernetes cluster. We are
also supporting additional multicluster topologies including different
[control plane models](/docs/ops/deployment/deployment-models/#control-plane-models)
topologies without requiring a flat network.

There is lots more -- see the [change notes](./change-notes) for complete
details.

There is more going on in the project as well. We know that Istio has a lot of
moving parts and can be a lot to take on. To help address that, we recently
formed a [Usability Working Group](https://github.com/istio/community/blob/master/WORKING-GROUPS.md#working-group-meetings)
(feel free to join). There is also a lot happening in the [Community
Meeting](https://github.com/istio/community#community-meeting) (Thursdays at
`11 a.m.`) and in the [Working
Groups](https://github.com/istio/community/blob/master/WORKING-GROUPS.md). And
if you haven’t yet joined the conversation at
[discuss.istio.io](https://discuss.istio.io), head over, log in with your
GitHub credentials and join us!

We are grateful to everyone who has worked hard on Istio over the last few
months -- patching 1.0, adding features to 1.1, and, lately, doing tons of
testing on 1.1. Thanks especially to those companies and users who worked with
us installing and upgrading to the early builds and helping us catch problems
before the release.

So: now’s the time! Grab 1.1, check out [the updated documentation](/docs/),
[install it](/docs/setup/) and...happy meshing!
