← Back

Cilium and Istio Ambient Integration Strategy

2025-08-26OpenInfra Days Korea 2025
Cilium
Istio
ServiceMesh
eBPF

Presentation Overview

At OpenInfra Days Korea 2025, we present the latest strategies for integrating eBPF-based Cilium and the sidecar-less Istio Ambient mode into a container-based test environment.

Key Topics

The Need for Service Mesh

As complexity and scalability of cloud-native infrastructure become increasingly important, service mesh architecture has established itself as a key solution for providing secure and observable networking between microservices.

Introduction to Cilium

  • High-performance network policies based on eBPF
  • Excellent observability
  • Real-time network monitoring with Hubble

Istio Ambient Mode

  • Lightweight sidecar-less mesh architecture
  • L4 traffic handling based on ztunnel
  • L7 policy enforcement via Waypoint Proxy
  • Reduced resource consumption compared to traditional Sidecar mode

Cilium + Istio Ambient Integration Strategy

  • Container-based test environment setup
  • Role division and complementarity between the two technologies
  • Network policy layering strategy
  • Considerations and troubleshooting during integration

Target Audience

  • Engineers interested in advanced Kubernetes networking
  • Teams evaluating service mesh adoption
  • Developers interested in eBPF and cloud-native technologies