.5 release, we introduced <a href=/v1.17/blog/2020/wasm-announce/>WebAssembly-based extensibility</a> to Istio.
Over the course of the year, the Istio, Envoy, and Proxy-Wasm communities have continued our joint efforts to make WebAssembly (Wasm)
extensibility stable, reliable, and easy to adopt. Let&rsquo;s walk through the updates to Wasm support through the Istio 1.9 release,
and our plans for the future.</p><h2 id=webassembly-support-merged-in-upstream-envoy>WebAssembly support merged in upstream Envoy</