Using Solo's builds of Istio

Solo.io, the leading contributor to Istio, makes the builds of Istio that underpin the Gloo Mesh enterprise product available for free community use. These builds include several enhancements to ambient mode.

Features

Solo’s builds of Istio include a number of features above and beyond what is available in the upstream releases. Prime amongst them is support for sidecar and ambient mode interoperability, which enables zero downtime migrations.

More features in the Solo builds of Istio, such as HTTP observability in ztunnel and FIPS support, can be unlocked with a Gloo Mesh license key.

How to use the Solo builds

Solo builds of Istio are published to us-docker.pkg.dev/soloio-img/istio.

Simply follow the upgrade guide to include the following settings in each of your Helm installations:

• hub - The repo key for the version that you want to install: --set global.hub=us-docker.pkg.dev/soloio-img/istio
• tag - The Istio version that you want to install, with the -solo tag appended: --set global.tag=1.25.2-solo

For example:

export HUB=us-docker.pkg.dev/soloio-img/istio
export TAG=1.25.2-solo
$ helm upgrade istio-base istio/base -n istio-system --set global.hub=$HUB --set global.tag=$TAG

Bugs and security vulnerabilities

Solo’s builds of Istio are free to use, but not open source.

• To report a bug, contact the Solo support team.
• To report a security vulnerability, send an email to the private [email protected] mailing list with the vulnerability details. For normal product bugs unrelated to latent security vulnerabilities, please log an issue with the related project issue tracker.

Support

Support for Solo’s builds of Istio is provided at #istio on the Solo.io Slack.