# Istio Operator

The istio/operator repo is part of istio/istio from 1.5 onwards.
You can [contribute](../CONTRIBUTING.md) by picking an
[unassigned open issue](https://github.com/istio/istio/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aarea%2Fenvironments%2Foperator+no%3Aassignee),
creating a [bug or feature request](../BUGS-AND-FEATURE-REQUESTS.md),

component of Ambient mesh.

## Issue management

We use GitHub to track all of our bugs and feature requests. Each issue we track has a variety of metadata:

- **Epic**. An epic represents a feature area for Istio as a whole. Epics are fairly broad in scope and are basically product-level things.
Each issue is ultimately part of an epic.