When the Istio service mesh was first proposed to be included in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in November 2017, it was still v.02, had only been around less than six months, and yet it aimed to skip the entry-level most young projects enter at and instead applied for inclusion at the secondary incubation tier. While the project was founded primarily by Google and IBM, and boasted numerous other contributors such as Yahoo, Apprenda, Concur, and AT&T, it was met with skepticism – it was so new, it didn’t really have adoption to speak of quite yet, and there were some technical concerns. Just a month after the proposal was made, the pull request was closed, without comment.
