Quickstart

Thanks for your interest in Istio!

Istio has two primary modes: ambient mode and sidecar mode.

  • Ambient mode is the new and improved model, created to address the shortcomings of sidecar mode. In ambient mode, a secure tunnel is installed on each node, and you can opt in to the full feature set with proxies you install, (generally) per-namespace.
  • Sidecar mode is the traditional model of service mesh pioneered by Istio in 2017. In sidecar mode, a proxy is deployed along with every Kubernetes pod or other workload.

Most of the energy in the Istio community is going towards improvement of ambient mode, although sidecar mode remains fully supported. Any major new feature contributed to the project is expected to work in both modes.

In general, we recommend that new users start with ambient mode. It is faster, cheaper, and easier to manage. There are advanced use cases that still require the use of sidecar mode, but closing these gaps is on our 2025 roadmap.

Get started with ambient mode Get started with sidecar mode
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