igcaption></figure><p>Although sidecars have significant advantages over refactoring applications, they do not provide a perfect separation between applications and the Istio data plane. This results in a few limitations:</p><ul><li><strong>Invasiveness</strong> - Sidecars must be &ldquo;injected&rdquo; into applications by modifying their Kubernetes pod spec and redirecting traffic within the pod. As a result, installing or upgrading sidecars requires restarting the application pod, which can be disruptive