xternal.svg title="The Bookinfo application with ratings v2 and an external MongoDB database"><img class=element-to-stretch src=/v1.18/blog/2018/egress-mongo/bookinfo-ratings-v2-mongodb-external.svg alt="The Bookinfo application with ratings v2 and an external MongoDB database"></a></div><figcaption>The Bookinfo application with ratings v2 and an external MongoDB database</figcaption></figure><p>Note that the MongoDB database is outside the Istio service mesh, or more precisely outside the Kubernetes cluste