In-place Upgrades

    Canary Upgrade is safer than doing an in-place upgrade and is the recommended upgrade method.

    The upgrade command can also perform a downgrade of Istio.

    See the for all the options provided by the istioctl upgrade command.

    istioctl upgrade is for in-place upgrade and not compatible with installations done with the --revision flag. Upgrades of such installations will fail with an error.

    Before you begin the upgrade process, check the following prerequisites:

    • Your Istio installation was .

    The commands in this section should be run using the new version of istioctl which can be found in the bin/ subdirectory of the downloaded package.

    1. and change directory to the new release directory.

    2. Ensure that your Kubernetes configuration points to the cluster to upgrade:

    3. Ensure that the upgrade is compatible with your environment.

    4. istioctl will in-place upgrade the Istio control plane and gateways to the new version and indicate the completion status.

    5. After istioctl completes the upgrade, you must manually update the Istio data plane by restarting any pods with Istio sidecars:

    Before you begin the downgrade process, check the following prerequisites:

    • Your Istio installation was .

    • The Istio version you intend to downgrade to is no more than one minor version less than the installed Istio version. For example, you can downgrade to no lower than 1.6.0 from Istio 1.7.x.

    Alternatively, istioctl install can be used to install an older version of the Istio control plane, but is not recommended because it does not perform any checks. For example, default values applied to the cluster for a configuration profile may change without warning.