Istio is the most popular service mesh, but the DevOps and SREs community constantly complain about its performance. Istio Ambient is a sidecar-less approach by the Istio committee (majorly driven by SOLO.io) to improve performance. Since there are many promotions about Ambient mesh being production-ready, many of our prospects and enterprises are generally eager to try or migrate to Ambient mesh. 

Architecturally, the Istio Ambient mesh is a great design that improves performance. But whether it performs quickly is still a question. We have tried Istio Ambient Mesh and observed the performance countless times between January 2024 and July 2024, and we have yet to see any significant performance gains.