Istio Ambient Explained

Service meshes such as Istio provide a lot of value to teams running microservices architectures or cloud workloads. But they do have their drawbacks. To help you implement their capabilities, most service meshes use a sidecar proxy, an architecture that comes with operational complexities and costly resource overhead.

In this report, authors Lin Sun and Christian Posta from Solo.io dive into Istio ambient mesh, a new sidecarless data plane mode designed for transparent application onboarding, simplified operation, and reduced infrastructure cost. Developers, architects, and platform owners will examine the challenges of existing sidecar architecture, explore the benefits of ambient mesh, and learn how to get started with Istio ambient service mesh.

With this report, you will
Understand the challenges of sidecar architecture and why ambient was introduced
Dig into the main architectural components of Istio ambient, such as the secure transport layer and waypoint proxies, to learn how this service mesh works
Learn the benefit of adopting ambient mesh incrementally from the secure overlay layer to enable rich L7 functionalities such as resilience, observability, security, and policy enforcement, while understanding the adoption differences with sidecars

Learn how to get started with ambient and take the next steps