Last week at Kubernetes Community Day New York, I gave a keynote titled "Simplify Cloud Native Operations with Conversations." In the demo, I used my AIRE agent in kagent to troubleshoot network issues and roll out a v2 version of an application, all through natural-language conversations. Behind the scenes, the demo brought together Kubernetes, agentgateway, Istio, Kiali, multiple Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and my favorite imagine agent powered by Google's Gemini. We had lots of fun and I even made my audience dance!
At the beginning of the keynote, I shared an embarrassing story from last summer. While deploying the GitHub MCP server with agentgateway, I ran into a label selector mismatch issue that I couldn't figure out on my own. 😅 I ended up reaching out to Nina Polshakova and John Howard for help debugging it.
Later that day, over lunch, I had the pleasure of chatting with James Quigley, who happened to be sitting across from me. Early in our conversation, he said something that immediately caught my attention:
"Just like John Howard has helped you from time to time, he was also instrumental in helping us troubleshoot Istio issues."
That comment sparked my curiosity about James's journey to adopting Istio Ambient. After lunch, I recorded a short interview with him to learn more about his experience.
In this interview, James shares why his team chose Ambient, what their adoption experience has been like, and how the Solo.io team has helped along the way.
You can watch the video interview here:
Or, if you prefer reading, you can find the transcript below:
Lin Sun: Hi James, can you introduce yourself?
James Quigley: My name is James Quigley and I run an infrastructure compute and cloud team.
Lin Sun: I heard you are a wonderful Istio Ambient user. Can you share with us a little bit about your journey to Istio Ambient and why?
James Quigley: Sure. So we have to deal with protected health information. So we had some homegrown MTLS communication between services to keep everything encrypted. And we wanted to take that out of application code and move it up into the platform set. So we explored a handful of different service mesh options out there and we landed on Ambient mode as it gave us a low overhead in terms of resource usage, since we were able to have ZTunnel at the node level, but also flexibility with waypoints to add things like authorization policies and things like that.
Lin Sun: That's great. How's your experience with Istio Ambient so far?
James Quigley: Pretty good. There's been a handful of hiccups — things that don't exactly work how you would expect as they do in sidecar mode. But most of them have gotten resolved pretty quickly and otherwise it just works. You turn it on and everything's encrypted and nobody even noticed.
Lin Sun: That's amazing. So you were an Istio sidecar user before you moved to Ambient, correct?
James Quigley: No, we were doing our own thing — no service mesh involved previously — so we went straight from that into Ambient mode.
Lin Sun: That's amazing. One last question — you are also using Solo's Istio, I believe it's called Solo Enterprise for Istio. Is there a particular feature from Solo's Istio Solo Enterprise for Istio that's not available in the open source Istio?
James Quigley: There definitely are, but I don't know that I can tell you them off the top of my head. There's something that we have that involves taking client identity information out of the mTLS that Istio is handling and forwarding that on through to the server. I believe that is custom with Solo Enterprise for Istio.
Lin Sun: That's awesome. So overall, what's your experience working with the Solo team on your Istio adoption?
James Quigley: It's been great. Solo's been very responsive to our needs and has helped us get it rolled out in production.
Lin Sun: Awesome. Thank you so much for being part of our community. We really appreciate it.
James Quigley: Yeah, thank you.
What stood out to me in this conversation wasn't just James's success with Ambient. It was how familiar his story felt.
Many teams start exploring Istio ambient because they want stronger security, simpler operations, or lower overhead. Along the way, they inevitably encounter questions, edge cases, and moments where they need help from people who have been there before. That's one of the things I love most about the Istio community.
Whether it was me asking John Howard for help debugging an MCP deployment, or James's team working through their own Istio challenges, the pattern is the same: cloud native adoption is a team sport.
A huge thank you to James for sharing his story and for being an active member of the community. If you're using Istio ambient (or agentgateway or kagent) today, I'd love to hear about your experience as well. Feel free to reach out, connect with me, or share your own lessons learned.
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