Service Mesh in 2024: Istio Ambient and Cilium Mesh

In 2024, the sidecar-or-not debate has an answer: Istio Ambient Mesh and Cilium Service Mesh bring sidecarless architecture to production, while Linkerd keeps ultra-light Rust sidecars. The right choice depends on your current CNI, the features you need, and the size of your ops team, not on which project wins in the abstract.

June 13, 2024 2 min 356 4.4

Architecture

Cilium Service Mesh: When You Don’t Need Sidecars

Cilium Service Mesh replaces Istio or Linkerd sidecars with eBPF in the kernel: it handles policy, WireGuard encryption, and Hubble observability without a per-pod proxy, cutting memory overhead from roughly 100 GB to about 5 GB in a 100-node cluster. It suits large clusters with teams comfortable with eBPF.

April 20, 2024 3 min 224 4.7