Istio Sidecar vs Ambient Mesh | DevOps Teams | Cloud Architects IMESH

Learn the difference between Istio sidecar and ambient mesh architecture. You will see how ambient mesh is better compared to sidecars and the benefits it brings to DevOps teams and cloud architects.

By default, Istio’s data plane constitutes Envoy proxies that run as sidecar containers. The sidecar containers intercept traffic to and from the application containers and provide Istio service mesh features: networking, security, and observability.

The latest Istio ambient mesh changes the default Istio sidecar architecture. Istio ambient mesh poses a sidecar-less data plane where the L4 and L7 capabilities of Istio are taken care of by two separate components, Ztunnel and waypoint (Envoy) proxies, respectively.

We discuss the topic in depth in the video:

00:10 What’s covered in the video
00:31 Istio sidecar architecture
01:50 Challenges with the sidecar model
03:08 Introducing Istio ambient mesh
04:08 Zero trust tunnel or Ztunnel for mTLS and L4 processing
04:40 Waypoint proxy for L7 processing
05:29 Benefits of Istio ambient mesh
07:30 Summary

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▬▬▬▬▬ About IMESH ▬▬▬▬▬▬

IMESH offers a Kubernetes-native application network and security platform to manage multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. The IMESH platform is built on top of Istio service mesh and Envoy API gateway and helps cloud, platform, and security teams to make Kubernetes applications more secure, manageable, and reliable.

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▬▬▬▬▬▬ Thanks ▬▬▬▬▬▬

[tionogu]

Thank you for the presentation. Your material is clearer than most I have seen on Youtube, even from CNCF

[lavanyadevops-bqrv]

Thank you so much for educating us with such a great content. Request you to please make a session on Istio version upgrade process if possible

[leiqiao]

Ambient is still in alpha so far, as I checked official site of Istio by the end of Nov, 2023