First draft of an announcement post for Istio 1.6

content/en/news/releases/1.6.x/announcing-1.6/_index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,86 @@
+---
+title: Announcing Istio 1.6
+linktitle: 1.6
+subtitle: Major Update
+description: Istio 1.6 release announcement.
+publishdate: 2020-05-19
+release: 1.6.0
+skip_list: true
+aliases:
+    - /news/announcing-1.6.0
+    - /news/announcing-1.6
+---
+
+We are pleased to announce the release of Istio 1.6!
+
+{{< relnote >}}
+
+With this release, we are continuing the path we charted earlier this year in
+our [roadmap post](/blog/2020/tradewinds-2020/), sailing toward more
+simplicity, a better installation experience, and some other goodies as well.
+
+Here’s some of what’s coming to you in today's release:
+
+## Simplify, simplify, simplify
+
+Last release, we introduced **Istiod**, a component that reduced the number of
+components in an Istio installation by combining the functionality of several
+other components. In Istio 1.6, you'll find that Citadel, the sidecar
+injector and Galley are no longer deployed.
+
+You'll also find that we are using the new `AppProtocol` API from Kubernetes.
+What does that mean for you? It means that you won't need to use the name
+field in your service to denote the protocol -- a simpler user experience.
+
+## Better lifecycle
+
+We continue to make installing and upgrading Istio a better experience. Our
+command line tool `istioctl` gives better diagnostic information, has a simpler
+install command, and even gives status in color!
+
+Upgrading Istio has been improved as well, in several powerful ways. First, we
+now support canarying of the Istio control plane itself. That means you can
+install a new version of the control plane alongside the existing version and
+selectively have proxies use the new one.
+
+We also have an `istioctl upgrade` command that will perform an in-place
+upgrade in your clusters (still giving you the control over updating the proxies
+themselves).
+
+Check out the [documentation](/docs/setup/upgrade/) for all of the details on
+the new upgrade experience.
+
+## Observe this!
+
+Many companies adopt Istio solely to get better observability of distributed
+applications, so we continue to invest there. You'll have to read the release
+notes to see all of the features, but you'll see more configurability, better
+ability to control your trace sampling rates, and updated Grafana dashboards
+(and we're even publishihg them on 'grafana.com' on the [Istio org page]
+(https://grafana.com/orgs/istio)).
+
+## Other improvements
+There are great traffic management features (like supporting the experimental
+Kubernetes Service APIs, better support for Ingress, and better header
+handling).
+
+For those of you who are adding non-Kubernetes workloads to meshes (for
+example, workloads deployed on VMs), the new
+[WorkloadEntry](/docs/reference/config/networking/workload-entry/) resource
+makes that easier than ever. VM-based workoads was another theme we called out
+in our roadmap post, and you can expect to see more in this area over the
+coming releases.
+
+## Join the Istio community
+
+As always, there is a lot happening in the
+[Community Meeting](https://github.com/istio/community#community-meeting);
+join us every other Thursday at 11 AM Pacific. We'd love to have you join the
+conversation at [Istio Discuss](https://discuss.istio.io), and you can also join
+our [Slack channel](https://istio.slack.com).
+
+We were very proud to be called out as one of the top five
+[fastest growing](https://octoverse.github.com/#top-and-trending-projects)
+open source projects in all of GitHub. Want to get involved? Join one of our
+[Working Groups](https://github.com/istio/community/blob/master/WORKING-GROUPS.md)
+and help us make Istio even better.