One of the most common reasons cited for not using OpenShift Service Mesh has been the gap between OSSM (Maistra) supported Istio releases and upstream Istio.

Upstream Istio has been a fast moving project - releasing quarterly, thus the only way to stay closer to upstream will be to increase our release cadence. We need to balance that many customers today want to work with a more recent Istio release, while customers will also not want to upgrade as quickly as upstream.

Thus, we would like to have 2-3 Service Mesh releases per year. With N-2 support, this would provide customers with a approximately a year of support per OSSM release.

To achieve this, we need to:

a) Reduce the time/effort to update Maistra with the latest Istio

b) Reduce the time/effort to make an OSSM release.

B has additional benefits beyond keeping up with Istio - as it will reduce the overhead involved with making both "Z" releases and larger releases, allowing our small team to focus more on feature development and being responsive to customer requests.