Istio 1.31 adds agentgateway waypoints and ends Google Cloud artifact publishing

The release shifts waypoint support in ambient mesh and forces teams using Istio’s old Google-hosted images and charts to move before the 13 October outage test.

Istio 1.31, released on 31 August, adds support for using agentgateway as a layer-7 waypoint in ambient mesh deployments and shifts the project’s release artifacts away from Google Cloud. The release also introduces a new canary-style waypoint traffic-splitting mechanism, plus zone-aware load balancing and an ALLOW_ANY_DYNAMIC_DNS mode that reduces the need for per-destination ServiceEntry objects. A follow-up 1.31.1 patch on 21 September fixes a bug in canary waypoint programming and includes security updates, while also correcting IPv6-only forwarding behavior for ALLOW_ANY_DYNAMIC_DNS. Teams still pulling from Istio’s old Google-hosted image or Helm repositories need to migrate before the 13 October outage test, ahead of those endpoints’ retirement in December.