The Istio project announced ambient mesh - its new sidecar-less dataplane mode in 2022, and released an alpha implementation in early 2023. Our alpha was focused on proving out the value of the ambient data plane mode under limited configurations and environments. However, the conditions were quite limited. Ambient mode relies on transparently redirecting traffic between workload pods and ztunnel, and the initial mechanism we used to do that conflicted with several categories of 3rd-party Con...
