CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

Ambient mesh introduces a new service mesh architecture without sidecars, but more than that, it gives us a way of thinking about the mesh as a set of API-driven network capabilities, distinct from the infrastructure used as an implementation. What if your mesh was truly ambient - if it was available and functional anywhere you have a network? This talk will show the state of the art of making Istio’s implementation details - the ztunnel L4 secure overlay and the L7 waypoint proxy - vanish into the cloud infrastructure. We’ll cover our efforts to standardize Istio’s Ambient Mesh interfaces to allow alternative implementations that can leverage existing infrastructure, requiring fewer components, and less management overhead. We’ll imagine alternative waypoint proxy implementations, such as managed load balancers, and non-Envoy proxies, and we’ll discuss how adjacent projects like Cilium CNI are vanishing into the infrastructure, and how these parallel efforts align with one another.