trong>), and its primary responsibility is to securely connect and authenticate elements within the mesh. The networking stack on the node redirects all traffic of participating workloads through the local ztunnel agent. This fully separates the concerns of Istio’s data plane from those of the application, ultimately allowing operators to enable, disable, scale, and upgrade the data plane without disturbing applications. The ztunnel performs no L7 processing on workload traffic, making it significantly le