Announcing Full Istio Ambient Mode Support for Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus
In January, we announced the general availability of Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus (TIS+) as a hosted Kubernetes network troubleshooting solution fo
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In January, we announced the general availability of Tetrate Istio Subscription Plus (TIS+) as a hosted Kubernetes network troubleshooting solution for Application Developers and Application Operations.
As a next step, Tetrate is excited to announce the same support for service mesh clusters that run Istio in ambient mode. With Istio 1.24 declaring GA support for Ambient mode, TIS+ will support all Observability that the Open-Source Istio in Ambient mode supports.
Taken together, TIS and TIS+ provide a comprehensive solution to support every stage of your Istio journey. From Istio break/fix support to troubleshooting the full TIS offering empowers organizations to confidently deploy, manage, and optimize Istio in any environment.
TIS+ is available standalone or as an add-on to your TIS package.
To see TIS+ in action, visit our website, get a demo, or read onwards!
Tetrate offers an enterprise-ready, 100% upstream distribution of Istio, Tetrate Istio Subscription (TIS). TIS is the easiest way to get started with Istio for production use cases. TIS+, a hosted Day 2 operations solution for Istio, adds a global service registry, unified Istio metrics dashboard, and self-service troubleshooting.
Istio Ambient Mode
Istio ambient mode is now stable as of Istio 1.24.
Istio’s ambient mode promises a reduced resource overhead in some use cases compared to the traditional sidecar deployment mode, which may result in lower costs and improved performance for some users by eliminating the need for a dedicated proxy container within each pod, while still providing service mesh capabilities like traffic management and security.
Ambient mode treats Node level traffic (at Layer 4 – designated as zTunnel) and Proxy level traffic (at Layer 7 – designated as Waypoints) as separate components, with the Waypoints associated only to a subset of services that specifically need Layer 7 capabilities support and thereby consuming fewer resources.
Most customers will be running a mesh with both the traditional, sidecar enabled Istio and ambient mode.
As of February 2025, TIS+ will support service discovery and observability of clusters running in Istio ambient mode. In this mode, TIS+ will:
- Offer service discovery and service dependency visualization, and provide a full service topology, health, and inter-service communication view of the deployment
- Collect aggregated metrics from the data path services
- Support distributed call tracing in a way that is supported by the ambient mesh’s observability feature-set.
What’s Next
In this monthly blog series, we will continuously announce TIS+ features, capabilities, and news.
Stay tuned for the next blog that will cover:
- TIS+ support for virtual machines
- TIS+ support for sidecar-less services (eBPF mode)
Get Started
Here are some resources to help you get started:
- Free training. If you’re new to Istio, check out our free Istio training at Tetrate Academy, including Istio Fundamentals and our Istio 0-60 and Istio Wasm workshops ›
- Hardened Istio distribution. If you’re looking to take Istio for a test drive, install Tetrate Istio Distro, our open source, 100% upstream Istio builds with extended CVE patching and version support.
- CVE scanner. If you’re already running Istio, try our free CVE scanner ›
- Config verification Learn more about our Istio config verification tooling, Tetrate Configuration Analyzer: Istio Configuration Security: How to Avoid Misconfigurations ›
- Let’s talk. Schedule a call with an Istio expert to find out how TIS and TIS+ can help speed delivery, reduce risk, and streamline Istio operations ›
- TIS+ Documentation. Learn about TIS+ through our online documentation.
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