• Branch Cut/Feature Freeze: October 28th, 2021 at https://github.com/istio/istio/commit/608da1f4d326114af8f823fbb72fb02d00b3d5be
• Code Freeze: November 12th, 2021
• Release Date: November 16th, 2021

• 1.12.0: November 16th, 2021 - First release
• 1.12.1: December 7th, 2021
• 1.12.2: January 18th, 2022
• 1.12.3: February 10th, 2022
• 1.12.4: February 22nd, 2022 (CVE release)
• 1.12.5: March 9th, 2022
• 1.12.6: March 29th, 2022

• Kenan O'Neal (Aspen Mesh): @Kmoneal
• Daniel Grimm (Red Hat): @dgn

• Release Notes Draft:
• Upgrade Notes Draft:

For any new, user facing changes targeting Istio 1.12, please add a note below. Examples can be found from the previous release: https://istio.io/news/2019/announcing-1.3/#release-notes. Please format entries following the Release Note Schema.

On October 14th, 2021, the release-1.12 branch will be created, 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-1.12 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 1.12.0 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 1.12.0 launch. The changes will appear on preliminary istio.io.