Istio Ambient Explained

Chapter 3. Exploring Istio Ambient Mesh

Now that you have an overview of the Istio ambient architecture, let’s walk through some Istio ambient mesh use cases, adoption strategy, the benefits it can bring to your organization, and how ambient mesh works. We’ll begin by looking at the new ambient profile, which installs the Istiod control plane and data plane components such as the Istio ingress gateway and ztunnel.

The Ambient Profile

There are several different ways to install Istio, including istioctl, helm, and Istio operators. Out of the three, Istio operators are discouraged due to a lack of maintenance. To start, istioctl is the most straightforward approach to installing Istio ambient mesh.

Istio has a few built-in configuration profiles such as demo, default, minimal, etc. that you can use when installing Istio. These profiles provide customization of the Istio control plane and data plane. The release of Istio ambient introduces the new ambient profile. The ambient profile is not yet the default profile at the time of this writing. Because it supports both the sidecar-less and sidecar architectures, we expect ambient will become the default profile for Istio once it is production ready. Therefore, to install ambient, you must specify the ambient profile.

Without any customization, the ambient profile installs the Istio custom resource definitions, Istiod, ingress gateway, ztunnel and CNI plug-in. The Istio CNI plug-in is required for the ambient profile because it is ...