What is Ambient Mesh?
Ambient mesh is the new architectural alternative that does not rely on sidecars for a service mesh. Building on the core functionality available in Istio, ambient mesh moves the proxy to the node-level for mTLS and identity. This reduces the number of proxies to manage, slashing service mesh costs by reducing the compute and memory requirements per node. Istio ambient mesh enables customers to reduce costs up to 90% while simplifying operations and improving performance for their applications. Security is never a tradeoff that customers need to worry about using ambient mesh. Istio has always had Zero-Trust Security built in and enabled by default, and it is never compromised with either sidecar or sidecar-less architectures.