tability and reliability of your cluster, especially as it grows.</li><li><strong>Istio, The Steady Performer:</strong> Istio&rsquo;s ambient mode, on the other hand, showed its strength in stability and maintaining decent throughput, even with the added overhead of encryption. While Istio did consume more memory and CPU than Cilium under test, its CPU utilization settled to a fraction of Cilium’s when not under load.</li></ul><h2 id=behind-the-scenes-why-the-difference>Behind the Scenes: Why the Differen