nable elevated Kubernetes permissions.</p><p>The CNI plugin can be chained with other plugins, and supports most hosted Kubernetes implementations.</p><p>In this release, we have promoted the CNI plugin functionality to Beta by improving our documentation and testing to ensure users can enable this feature safely in production. <a href=/v1.12/docs/setup/additional-setup/cni/>Learn how to install Istio with the CNI plugin.</a></p><h2 id=external-control-plane-beta>External control plane (Beta)</h2><p>Last ye