Why Do You Need Istio Ambient Mesh?
It is given that Istio is a bit resource intensive due to sidecar proxy. Although there are a lot of compelling security features that can be used, the whole Istio (the sidecar) has to be deployed from day one. Recently, the Istio community has reimagined a new data plane — ambient mode — which will be far less resource-intensive. Istio ambient mesh is a modified and sidecar-less data plane developed for enterprises that want to deploy mTLS and other security features first and deploy an advanced network later.
Ambient mesh has two layers: