Abstract. This paper gives a brief overview over the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) project and model. IRI is recognized as the official standard for the ionosphere by the International Standardization Organization (ISO), the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), and the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECCS). Of great importance are the external drivers of the model that help IRI to represent ionospheric conditions as realistically as possible. The paper discusses the drivers currently used presents recent improvements and changes. Besides the standard solar, magnetic, and ionospheric indices the paper also reports on the adjustment of the model with data and equivalent indices and on the progress towards a Real-Time IRI using data assimilation. IRI has been widely validated with many different data sources and has fared very well in community wide assessment studies. We present some of these studies and document the wide usages of the model in the scientific literature. Finally, we present an outlook on things to come in IRI-2018 and thereafter.