tion communicates with the external DB with plain MongoDB protocol. The first change made for this study was to establish a TLS communication between the MongoDB and its clients running within the application, as this is a more realistic scenario.</p><p>Several cases for accessing the external database from the mesh were tested and described next.</p><h2 id=egress-traffic-cases>Egress traffic cases</h2><h3 id=case-1-bypassing-the-sidecar>Case 1: Bypassing the sidecar</h3><p>In this case, the sidecar does no