ucing ztunnel’s scope we allow for it to be replaced by other secure tunnel implementations that can meet a well-defined interoperability contract.</li></ul><h2 id=but-what-about-those-extra-hops>But what about those extra hops?</h2><p>With ambient mesh, a waypoint isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be on the same node as the workloads it serves. While at first glance this may appear to be a performance concern, we’re confident that latency will ultimately be in-line with Istio’s current sidecar implem