Istio Release 1.21

Timeline

• Branch Cut / Feature Freeze: January 22nd, 2024
• Code Freeze / Release Candidate: February 12th, 2024
• Expected Release Date: February 19th, 2024
• Actual Release Date: March 13th, 2024

Point releases

Release Managers

• Aryan Gupta - Google (aryan16)
• Jianpeng He - Tetrate (zirain)
• Sumit Vij - Credit Karma (thedebugger)

How do I get my changes into the release?

On January 22th, 2024, the primary RM will create the release-1.21 branch, based on master. Any changes on master before this date will be included in the release. Any changes after will have to be cherry picked.

To get a PR merged into the release branch, it must first be merged into the master branch. PRs can automatically be cherrypicked by typing by adding the cherrypick/release-1.21 label to the PR.

A PR on the release branch will only be approved if:

• The change is already on master.
  • exception: if a change only applies to the release branch, and should not go to master, a change can be submitted directly to the release branch, but please note this in the PR description.
• The change is a bug fix, documentation enhancement, or testing enhancement.
  • Changes that are risky may require a feature flag, especially after the 1.21.0 release.
  • Any change not meeting the above, such as a new feature or API, may require TOC approval.

Note: on the istio.io repo, changes should go directly to master until after the 1.21.0 launch. The changes will appear on preliminary istio.io.