KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 lit up Atlanta from November 10–13, bringing together one of the largest gatherings of open-source practitioners, platform engineers, and maintainers across the cloud native ecosystem. For the Istio community, the week was defined by packed rooms, long hallway conversations, and a genuine sense of shared progress across service mesh, Gateway API, security, and AI-driven platforms.
Before the main conference began, the community kicked things off with Istio Day on November 10, a colocated event filled with deep technical sessions, migration stories, and future-looking discussions that set the tone for the rest of the week.
Istio Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA
Istio Day brought together practitioners, contributors, and adopters for an afternoon of learning, sharing, and open conversations about where service mesh, and Istio, are headed next.
Istio Day opened with welcome remarks from the program co-chairs, setting the tone for an afternoon focused on real-world mesh evolution and the rapid growth of the Istio community. The agenda highlighted three major themes driving Istio’s future: AI-driven traffic patterns, the advancement of Ambient Mesh—including multicluster adoption, and modernizing traffic entry with Gateway API. Speakers across the ecosystem shared practical lessons on scaling, migration, reliability, and operating increasingly complex workloads with Istio.
The co-chairs closed the day by recognizing the speakers, contributors, and a community continuing to push service-mesh innovation forward. Recordings of all sessions are available at the CNCF YouTube channel.
Istio at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
Outside of Istio Day, the project was highly visible across KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Atlanta, with maintainers, end users, and contributors sharing technical deep dives, production stories, and cutting-edge research. Istio appeared not only across expo booths and breakout sessions, but also throughout several of the keynotes, where companies showcased how Istio plays a critical role in powering their platforms at scale.
The week’s momentum fully met its stride when the Istio community reconvened with the Istio Project Update, where project leads shared latest releases and roadmap advances. In Istio: Set Sailing With Istio Without Sidecars, attendees explored how sidecar-less Ambient Mesh architecture is rapidly moving from experiment to adoption, opening new possibilities for simpler deployments and leaner data-planes.
The session Lessons Applied Building a Next-Generation AI Proxy took the crowd behind the scenes of how mesh technologies adapt to AI-driven traffic patterns and over at Automated Rightsizing for Istio DaemonSet Workloads (Poster Session), practitioners gathered to compare strategies for optimizing control-plane resources, tuning for high scale, and reducing cost without sacrificing performance.
The narrative of traffic-management evolution featured prominently in Gateway API: Table Stakes and its faster sibling Know Before You Go! Speedrun Intro to Gateway API. Meanwhile, Return of the Mesh: Gateway API’s Epic Quest for Unity scaled that conversation: how traffic, API, mesh, and routing converge into one architecture that simplifies complexity rather than multiplies it.
For long-term reflection, 5 Key Lessons From 8 Years of Building Kgateway delivered hard-earned wisdom from years of system design. In GAMMA in Action: How Careem Migrated To Istio Without Downtime, the real-world migration story—a major production rollout that stayed up during transition—provided a roadmap for teams seeking safe mesh adoption at scale.
Safety and rollout risks took center stage in Taming Rollout Risks in Distributed Web Apps: A Location-Aware Gradual Deployment Approach, where strategies for regional rollouts, steering traffic, and minimizing user impact were laid out.
Finally, operations and day-two reality were tackled in End-to-End Security With gRPC in Kubernetes and On-Call the Easy Way With Agents, reminding everyone that mesh isn’t just about architecture, but about how teams run software safely, reliably, and confidently.
Community spaces: ContribFest, Maintainer Track and the Project Pavilion
At the Project Pavilion, the Istio kiosk was constantly buzzing, drawing users with questions about Ambient Mesh, AI workloads, and deployment best practices.
The Maintainer Track brought contributors together to collaborate on roadmap topics, triage issues, and discuss key areas of investment for the next year.
At ContribFest, new contributors joined maintainers to work through good-first issues, discuss contribution pathways, and get their first PRs lined up.
Istio maintainers eecognized at the CNCF Community Awards
This year’s CNCF Community Awards were a proud moment for the project. Two Istio maintainers received well-deserved recognition:
Daniel Hawton — “Chop Wood, Carry Water” Award
John Howard — Top Committer Award
Beyond these awards, Istio was also represented prominently in conference leadership. Faseela K, one of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA co-chairs and an Istio maintainer, participated in a keynote panel on Cloud Native for Good. During closing remarks, it was also announced that Lin Sun, another long-time Istio maintainer, will serve as an upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair.
What we heard in Atlanta
Across sessions, kiosks, and hallways, a few themes emerged:
- Ambient Mesh is moving quickly from exploration to real-world adoption.
- AI workloads are reshaping traffic patterns and operational practices.
- Multicluster deployments are becoming standard, with stronger focus on identity and failover.
- Gateway API is solidifying as the future of modern traffic management.
- Contributor growth is accelerating, supported by ContribFest and hands-on community guidance.
Looking ahead
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 showcased a vibrant, rapidly growing community taking on some of the toughest challenges in cloud infrastructure—from AI traffic management to zero-downtime migrations, from planet-scale control planes to the next generation of sidecar-less mesh. As we look ahead to 2026, the momentum from Atlanta makes one thing clear: the future of service mesh is bright, and the Istio community is leading it together.
See you in Amsterdam!