rk (<a href=https://www.clockwork.io/there-is-no-upside-to-vm-colocation/>modern cloud providers have extremely fast networks</a>). Instead the biggest culprit is the intensive L7 processing Istio needs to implement its sophisticated feature set. Unlike sidecars, which implement two L7 processing steps for each connection (one for each sidecar), ambient mode collapses these two steps into one. In most cases, we expect this reduced processing cost to compensate for an additional network hop.</li><li>Users of