Istio 1.31 adds agentgateway waypoints and moves release artifacts off Google Cloud

Istio 1.31, released on 31 August, lets teams run agentgateway as a Layer 7 waypoint proxy in an ambient mesh via the new istio-agentgateway-waypoint GatewayClass. The project is migrating its infrastructure from Google Cloud to AWS, retiring the old image and Helm repositories in December after a scream test on 13 October.

• Istio 1.31.0 supports Kubernetes 1.32 to 1.36 and Rust-based agentgateway with MCP
• Waypoint traffic shifting is alpha via the use-waypoint-canary label and weight annotation
• Patch 1.31.1 fixed canary-only waypoint routing and IPv6-only cluster DNS forwarding
• gcr.io/istio-release and registry.istio.io retire in December after the 13 October test