Solo.io, the cloud-native application networking company, is continuing to advance, evolve, and accelerate enterprise Istio adoption with Istio Ambient Mesh. Solo.io co-developed Istio Ambient Mesh with Google, and the new Istio Ambient Mesh architectural framework will be contributed to the Istio Project.

Istio Ambient Mesh is both an evolution of Istio and a next-generation architecture that gives applications and infrastructure teams greater flexibility, security, and performance. The new framework meets the ever-changing requirements of forward-looking enterprises as they deploy more diverse applications at greater scale.

According to Solo.io, Istio Ambient Mesh is the industry’s first service mesh to deliver both sidecar or sidecarless architectures, with a consistent control plane for any deployment model. Companies now have greater flexibility to deploy applications on Istio, while continuing to have a proven model for scaling and securing applications.

Istio Ambient Mesh addresses several challenges the Istio community has reported, including: improving the performance of applications that use a service mesh, reducing the compute/memory overhead resources required for a service mesh, simplifying ongoing operations of the service mesh, enabling greater flexibility for applications that do not always require full Layer 7 services from the service mesh (for example, if only Layer 4 is needed), and more.

Istio Ambient Mesh offers a more flexible set of architectural choices, meaning that performance, security, and application offload can now be configured on a highly granular basis. The new framework also delivers on three critical areas that will improve the overall experience for Istio users.

Availability
Istio Ambient Mesh is fully open source and part of the Istio project; it is also fully compatible with Istio. Istio Ambient Mesh is an optional configuration of Istio and can co-exist with previous configurations of Istio. Istio Ambient Mesh is currently available in beta to Solo.io customers and will be fully GA in the upcoming Solo.io Gloo Mesh 2.1 platform release. It is currently available as a tech preview in Gloo Mesh.