SALT LAKE CITY -- The Istio project announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 the general availability of Istio Ambient Multi-Network, along with new sidecar-to-Ambient migration support and a Traffic Extension API. The updates are aimed at platform operators who need consistent security, visibility and control as AI agents are deployed alongside traditional cloud native applications.
Active-Active Workloads Across Networks and Clouds #
With Ambient Multi-Network now generally available, platform operators can deploy resilient, active-active workloads across dozens of Kubernetes clusters spanning different networks, regions and clouds while maintaining consistent service connectivity and traffic management. For organizations already running Istio’s traditional sidecar architecture, the new migration support provides a path to move workloads to Ambient mode without starting from scratch. Ambient mode separates service mesh functionality from individual application pods, and the project reports that the architecture can deliver more than 60% improvement in resource utilization and a 75% reduction in latency.
Traffic Extension API Uses Lua and Wasm #
The new Traffic Extension API gives operators a simpler way to customize how traffic moves through their environments. Using Lua and WebAssembly (Wasm), teams can modify, redirect and filter traffic without deep knowledge of Envoy’s internal implementation, which the project said makes advanced traffic customization more accessible for application-specific networking requirements, including new AI-driven services.
“Istio is evolving to meet these demands, providing a unified networking foundation for workloads running across clusters, clouds and runtime environments,” wrote Mitch Connors of the Istio Technical Oversight Committee. More information is available at istio.io.