Istio Ambient Mesh implements a “sidecarless” architecture which is transparent to the workloads in the mesh. This approach provides a number of benefits including incremental adoption, improved operations, and more. This hands-on course will help you better understand how Istio Ambient Mesh works.

First, you'll need to install Istio using the new Ambient profile, which will install the Istiod control plane along with data plane components such as Istio ingress gateway and ztunnels. After that, you'll learn how to onboard service into the mesh and you'll explore several capabilities, including:

• Layer 4 authorization policies
• Layer 7 authorization policies
• Layer 7 observability
• Fault injection
• Traffic shifting

Learning resources:

https://academy.solo.io/get-started-with-istio-ambient-mesh-with-istio-ambient-mesh-foundation-certification

Introducing Istio Ambient Mesh

https://www.solo.io/blog/istio-ambient-mesh-evolution-service-mesh/

Understanding Istio Ambient Ztunnel and Secure Overlay

https://www.solo.io/blog/understanding-istio-ambient-ztunnel-and-secure-overlay/

Deciding on Rust-based ztunnel for Istio ambient mesh

https://www.solo.io/blog/rust-ztunnel-istio-ambient-mesh/