ce?</h2><p>The key to understanding these performance differences lies in the architecture and design of each tool.</p><ul><li><strong>Cilium&rsquo;s Control Plane Conundrum:</strong> Cilium runs a control plane instance on each node, leading to API server strain and configuration overhead as your cluster expands. This frequently caused our API server to crash, followed by Cilium becoming unready, and the entire cluster becoming unresponsive.</li><li><strong>Istio&rsquo;s Efficiency Edge:</strong> Istio, wi