riously dull.
More details on our major efforts in 2020 below.</p><h2 id=sleeker-smoother-and-faster>Sleeker, smoother and faster</h2><p>Istio provided for extensibility from day one, implemented by a component called
Mixer. Mixer is a platform that allows custom
<a href=https://istio.io/v1.6/docs/reference/config/policy-and-telemetry/mixer-overview/#adapters>adapters</a>
to act as an intermediary between the data plane and the backends you use for
policy or telemetry. Mixer necessarily added overhead to re