While the crucial role of gauge topology was recognized from 1970’s, confinement was associated with monopoles and chiral symmetry breaking with instantons. Recognizing presence of non-zero holonomy, van Baal and others discovered splitting of the instantons into their constituents — the instanton-dyons. Several groups now work out properties of their ensembles, which generate both the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions in QCD-like theories. Introducing variable phases for quark periodicity conditions — known as flavor holonomies — one can switch fermion coupling to different dyons, and thus dramatically change both the order and temperature of both transitions. First lattice studies of modified — so called $Z_N$-symmetric QCD — have also found these effects.