istio.io/_about/feature-stages.md

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Starting with 0.3, Istio releases are delivered on a monthly cadence. You can download the current version by visiting our release page.

Please note that the phases (alpha, beta, and stable) are applied to individual features within the project, not to the project as a whole. Here is a high level description of what these labels means:

Feature Phase Definition

	Alpha	Beta	Stable
Purpose	Demo-able, works end-to-end but has limitations	Usable in production, not a toy anymore	Dependable, production hardened
API	No guarantees on backward compatibility	APIs are versioned	Dependable, production-worthy. APIs are versioned, with automated version conversion for backward compatibility
Performance	Not quantified or guaranteed	Not quantified or guaranteed	Perf (latency/scale) is quantified, documented, with guarantees against regression
Deprecation Policy	None	Weak - 3 months	Dependable, Firm. 1 year notice will be provided before changes

Istio features

Below is our list of existing features and their current phases. This information will be updated after every monthly release.

Traffic Management

Feature	Phase
Protocols: HTTP 1.1	Beta
Protocols: HTTP 2.0	Alpha
Protocols: gRPC	Alpha
Protocols: TCP	Alpha
Protocols: WebSocket	Alpha
Protocols: MongoDB	Alpha
Routing Rules: Retry	Alpha
Routing Rules: Timeout	Alpha
Routing Rules: Circuit Break	Alpha
Routing Rules: Header Rewrite	Alpha
Routing Rules: Traffic Splitting	Alpha
Memquota Implementation and Integration	Alpha
Ingress TLS	Alpha

Observability

Feature	Phase
Prometheus Integration	Beta
Local Logging (STDIO)	Beta
Statsd Integration	Stable
Service Dashboard in Grafana	Beta
Stackdriver Integration	Alpha
Service Graph	Alpha
Distributed Tracing to Zipkin / Jaeger	Alpha
Istio Component Dashboard in Grafana - New to 0.5	Alpha

Security

Feature	Phase
Deny Checker	Beta
List Checker	Beta
Kubernetes: Service Credential Distribution	Beta
Pluggable Key/Cert Support for Istio CA	Stable
Service-to-service mutual TLS	Beta
Incremental Enablement of service-to-service mutual TLS	Alpha
VM: Service Credential Distribution	Alpha
OPA Checker	Alpha

Core

Feature	Phase
Kubernetes: Envoy Installation and Traffic Interception	Beta
Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Installation	Beta
Pilot Integration into Kubernetes Service Discovery	Stable
Attribute Expression Language	Beta
Mixer Adapter Authoring Model	Beta
VM: Envoy Installation, Traffic Interception and Service Registration	Alpha
VM: Istio Control Plane Installation and Upgrade (Galley, Mixer, Pilot, CA)	Alpha
Kubernetes: Istio Control Plane Upgrade	Alpha
Pilot Integration into Consul	Alpha
Pilot Integration into Eureka	Alpha
Pilot Integration into Cloud Foundry Service Discovery	Alpha
Basic Config Resource Validation	Alpha

Please get in touch by joining our community if there are features you'd like to see in our future releases!