Managing microservices across multiple Kubernetes clusters is essential for high availability, disaster recovery, and regional performance. Yet traditional service meshes with sidecars can become a management burden—more proxies to wrangle, more resources required and more operational friction when expanding across clouds.
As microservices architectures mature, organizations increasingly operate workloads across multiple clusters and clouds. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of enterprises will run dedicated platform teams to support multi-cluster, distributed systems. Yet sidecar-heavy service meshes create both resource and management overhead, especially at scale.
Enter Istio Ambient Mesh. By decoupling the data plane from the sidecar model, Ambient Mesh delivers secure, efficient service mesh capabilities, improves resource efficiency and reduces costs. Ambient Mesh can scale up to over 100 million pods using Gloo Mesh’s multi-cluster mode.
Solo is a proud co-founder and lead contributor to the Istio project.
What Is Multi-Cluster Ambient Mesh?
Ambient Mesh is the next evolution in service mesh. Instead of deploying a sidecar proxy for each workload, Ambient Mesh uses a shared, per-node proxy called zTunnel for Layer 4 security and traffic management, and introduces Waypoint proxies at Layer 7 only where advanced routing or policies are needed. This approach drastically reduces infrastructure footprint and complexity.
When expanded across clusters, multi-cluster Ambient Mesh forms a unified mesh fabric, connecting services seamlessly whether they run in different Kubernetes clusters, VPCs, or clouds. This architecture enables consistent security, policy enforcement and observability everywhere applications run.
Why Enterprises Need to Adopt Multi-Cluster
The rapid adoption of cloud-native platforms has made multi-cluster deployments table stakes for enterprises seeking resilience and low-latency user experiences worldwide. Yet the challenge of managing security and traffic across distributed clusters is complex.
Ambient Mesh addresses these pain points by:
- Eliminating Sidecar Costs: No more per-pod proxies means fewer resources consumed, and no need for pod restarts when updating mesh configuration.
- Delivering Seamless Security: Always-on mTLS and SPIFFE-based identities flow between clusters, even across cloud providers, establishing a true zero-trust perimeter.
- Enabling Unified Operations: A single set of CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions) and a global control plane (powered by Istiod and Gloo Mesh) manage all clusters and policies.
Three Step Multi-Cluster Ambient Mesh Implementation
Deploying a multi-cluster ambient mesh is straightforward and can be accomplished with modern tools and automated workflows. Implement Ambient Mesh in just three steps:
- Install Istio with the Ambient Profile:
On each Kubernetes cluster, deploy Istio using the ambient mode. Official setup docs are available at AmbientMesh.io. - Register Each Cluster with the Mesh:
Use the Gloo Operator or the meshctl cluster register --ambient command to add clusters to the management plane. See Gloo Mesh Ambient Setup Guide for step-by-step instructions. - Label Namespaces for Ambient:
Opt workloads into the mesh by labeling their namespaces (no code changes or pod restarts required).
For more information, see the setup documentation.
Performance Benchmarks
In large-scale testing, the Ambient Mesh model demonstrated over 90% reduction in memory usage compared to sidecar-based meshes. For a deep dive on scaling above 1 million pods, see the engineering blog and this multi-cluster scale webinar.
Advanced Tips, Integrations, & Scaling
Integrate with Cloud Key Management:
Secure mesh credentials with enterprise key management solutions.
Observability at Scale:
Deploy Prometheus and OpenTelemetry for cross-cluster monitoring. Use 100% trace sampling for debugging during rollout, then tune for production as needed.
Incremental Adoption:
Ambient Mesh supports coexistence with sidecar pods, enabling smooth, phased migrations.
Multi-Cloud Portability:
Keep manifest and policy consistency across EKS, GKE, AKS, and on-prem clusters.
Conclusion
Multi-Cluster Ambient Mesh is redefining how enterprises connect, secure, and operate distributed microservices without the legacy burden of sidecar proxies. By unifying security, policy and observability across every cluster and cloud, organizations can achieve true zero-trust networking and operational simplicity at any scale.
Ready to experience the benefits of Ambient Mesh?
- Try Gloo Mesh Ambient in your clusters today.
- Explore the documentation for hands-on guides and YAML samples.
Go sidecareless to unlock cloud-native agility and resilience. Ambient Mesh enables enteprise teams to innovate, scale and secure modern applications with confidence.
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