In-cluster control plane supported features

This page describes features that are supported in Anthos Service Mesh 1.20.4 with an in-cluster control plane. To see the supported features for Anthos Service Mesh 1.20.4 with a managed control plane instead, see Managed control plane.

Supported versions

Support for Anthos Service Mesh follows the GKE Enterprise Version Support Policy.

For managed Anthos Service Mesh, Google supports the current Anthos Service Mesh versions available in each release channel.

For self-installed in-cluster Anthos Service Mesh, Google supports the current and previous two (n-2) minor versions of Anthos Service Mesh.

The following table shows the supported versions of self-installed in-cluster Anthos Service Mesh and the earliest end-of-life (EOL) date for a version.

Release version Release date Earliest end of life date
1.20 February 8, 2024 November 8, 2024
1.19 October 31, 2023 July 31, 2024
1.18 August 3, 2023 June 1, 2024

If you are on an unsupported version of Anthos Service Mesh, then you must upgrade to Anthos Service Mesh 1.18 or later. For information on how to upgrade, see Upgrade Anthos Service Mesh.

The following table shows the unsupported versions of Anthos Service Mesh and their end-of-life (EOL) date.

Release version Release date End-of-life date
1.17 April 4, 2023 Unsupported (February 8, 2024)
1.16 February 21, 2023 Unsupported (December 11, 2023)
1.15 October 25, 2022 Unsupported (August 4, 2023)
1.14 July 20, 2022 Unsupported (April 20, 2023)
1.13 March 30, 2022 Unsupported (February 8, 2023)
1.12 December 9, 2021 Unsupported (October 25, 2022)
1.11 October 6, 2021 Unsupported (July 20, 2022)
1.10 June 24, 2021 Unsupported (March 30, 2022)
1.9 March 4, 2021 Unsupported (December 14, 2021)
1.8 December 15, 2020 Unsupported (December 14, 2021)
1.7 November 3, 2020 Unsupported (December 14, 2021)
1.6 June 30, 2020 Unsupported (March 30, 2021)
1.5 May 20, 2020 Unsupported (February 17, 2021)
1.4 December 20, 2019 Unsupported (September 18, 2020)

For more information about our support policies, refer to Getting support.

Platform differences

There are differences in supported features between supported platforms.

The Other GKE Enterprise clusters columns refer to clusters that are outside of Google Cloud, for example:

  • Google Distributed Cloud Virtual:

    • GKE on VMware
    • Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Bare Metal

    This page uses Google Distributed Cloud Virtual where the same support is available on both GKE on VMware and Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Bare Metal, and the specific platform where there are differences between the platforms.

  • GKE Enterprise on other public clouds:

  • GKE attached clusters - Third-party Kubernetes clusters that have been registered to a fleet. Anthos Service Mesh is supported on the following cluster types:

    • Amazon EKS clusters
    • Microsoft AKS clusters

In the following tables:

  • – indicates the feature is enabled by default.
  • * – indicates the feature is supported for the platform and can be enabled, as described in Enabling optional features or the feature guide linked in the feature table.
  • Compatible – indicates the feature or third-party tool will integrate or work with Anthos Service Mesh, but is not fully supported by Google Cloud Support and a feature guide is not available.
  • – indicates either the feature isn't available or it isn't supported in Anthos Service Mesh 1.20.4.

The default and optional features are fully supported by Google Cloud Support. Features not explicitly listed in the tables receive best-effort support.

Security

Certificate distribution/rotation mechanisms

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Workload certificate management
External certificate management on ingress and egress gateways.

Certificate authority (CA) support

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Anthos Service Mesh certificate authority (Mesh CA)
Certificate Authority Service * *
Istio CA (previously known as Citadel) * *
Plug in your own CA certificates Supported by CA service and Istio CA Supported by CA service and Istio CA Supported by Istio CA

Anthos Service Mesh security features

In addition to supporting Istio security features, Anthos Service Mesh provides even more capabilities to help you secure your applications.

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Distributed Cloud Virtual GKE Multi-Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
IAP integration
End-user authentication
Audit policies (preview) *
Dry-run mode
Denial logging

Authorization policy

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Authorization v1beta1 policy

Authentication policy

Peer authentication

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Auto-mTLS
mTLS PERMISSIVE mode

For information on enabling mTLS STRICT mode, see Configuring transport security.

Request authentication

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
JWT authentication (Note 1)

Notes:

  1. Third-party JWT is enabled by default.

Base Images

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Distroless proxy image

Telemetry

Metrics

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Cloud Monitoring (HTTP in-proxy metrics)
Cloud Monitoring (TCP in-proxy metrics)
Istio Telemetry API
Custom adapters/backends, in or out of process
Arbitrary telemetry and logging backends
Prometheus metrics export to customer-installed Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali dashboards Compatible Compatible Compatible
Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, not including the Anthos Service Mesh dashboard
The topology graph in the Google Cloud console no longer uses the Mesh telemetry service as its data source. Although the data source for the topology graph has changed, the UI remains the same.

Proxy request logging

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Traffic logs
Access logs * * *

Tracing

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Cloud Trace * *
Jaeger tracing (allows use of customer-managed Jaeger) Compatible Compatible Compatible
Zipkin tracing (allows use of customer-managed Zipkin) Compatible Compatible Compatible
The integration between Anthos Service Mesh and Jaeger or Zipkin is supported. See Distributed Tracing for details.

Networking

Traffic interception/redirection mechanism

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Traditional use of iptables using init containers with CAP_NET_ADMIN
Container Network Interface (CNI) * *

Protocol support

Services that are configured with Layer 7 capabilities for the following protocols are not supported: WebSocket, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Cloud SQL. You might be able to make the protocol work by using TCP byte stream support. If TCP byte stream cannot support the protocol (for example, Kafka sends a redirect address in a protocol-specific reply and this redirect is incompatible with Anthos Service Mesh's routing logic), then the protocol isn't supported.

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
IPv4
HTTP/1.1
HTTP/2
TCP byte streams (Note 1)
gRPC
IPv6

Notes:

  1. Although TCP is a supported protocol for networking, TCP metrics aren't collected or reported. Metrics are displayed only for HTTP services in the Google Cloud console.

Envoy deployments

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Sidecars
Ingress gateway
Egress directly out from sidecars
Egress using egress gateways * *

CRD support

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Istio API support (exceptions below)
custom Envoy filters

Load balancer for the Istio ingress gateway

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Third-party external load balancer
Google Cloud Internal load balancer * Not supported. See the links below.

For information on configuring load balancers, see the following:

Kubernetes Gateway API (preview)

In Anthos Service Mesh v1.20 the Kubernetes Gateway API is available as a public preview.

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Ingress
Gateway with class: istio
HttpRoute using parentRef
Mesh traffic
Configuring Istio CRDs using the targetRef field
including AuthorizationPolicy, RequestAuthentication, Telemetry and WasmPlugin

If you are using Microsoft AKS attached clusters or GKE on Azure clusters, you must set the following annotation for the gateway resource to configure health checks over TCP:

  service.beta.kubernetes.io/port_80_health-probe_protocol: tcp

Otherwise, HTTP traffic won't be accepted.

Kubernetes Gateway API preview requirements

The Kubernetes Gateway API preview has the following requirements:

  • Use the default automated deployments behavior for Gateways.

  • Use the HttpRoute CRD for routing configurations. The HttpRoute must have a parentRef pointing to a Gateway.

  • Don't use Istio Gateway CRs and Kubernetes Gateway API CRs on the same cluster.

Load balancing policies

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Round robin
Least connections
Random
Passthrough
Consistent hash
Locality

For more information on load balancing policies, see Destination Rules.

Multi-cluster support

For multi-primary deployments of GKE clusters in different projects, all the clusters must be in a shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Network

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises GKE on AWS GKE on Azure Attached clusters
Single network
Multi-network

Notes:

  • For attached clusters, only multi-cluster meshes spanning a single platform (Microsoft AKS, Amazon EKS) are supported at this time.

Deployment model

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE Enterprise clusters on-premises GKE Enterprise on other public clouds Attached clusters
Multi-primary
Primary-remote

Notes on terminology:

  • A primary cluster is a cluster with a control plane. A single mesh can have more than one primary cluster for high availability or to reduce latency. In the Istio 1.7 documentation, a multi-primary deployment is referred to as a replicated control plane.

  • A remote cluster is a cluster that connects to a control plane residing outside of the cluster. A remote cluster can connect to a control plane running in a primary cluster or to an external control plane.

  • Anthos Service Mesh uses a simplified definition of network based on general connectivity. Workload instances are on the same network if they are able to communicate directly, without a gateway.

User interface

Feature GKE clusters on Google Cloud GKE on VMware Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Bare Metal Other GKE Enterprise clusters
Anthos Service Mesh dashboards in the Google Cloud console * * *
Cloud Monitoring *
Cloud Logging *
Cloud Trace *

Note: On-premises clusters require GKE Enterprise version 1.11 or later. For more information on upgrading see Upgrading GKE on VMware or Upgrading Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Bare Metal.