Istio at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025: Community highlights and project progress

Istio Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA Istio at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Community spaces: ContribFest, Maintainer Track and the Project Pavilion Istio maintainers eecognized at the CNCF Community Awards What we heard in Atlanta Looking ahead Posted on December 8, 2025 by Faseela K, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2025 Co-Chair and Istio Steering Committee Member CNCF projects highlighted in this post 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 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. 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.