An Update on Our Container Registry Migration

In a previous blog post , we announced that Istio will retire the gcr.io/istio-release container registry in late 2026 and switch to registry.istio.io/release as the new home for Istio images. The original design was that registry.istio.io/release would be a Cloudflare worker that proxied requests to any OCI-compliant registry, allowing us to switch registries without any interruption to Istio users. Currently, we proxy to gcr.io/istio-release .