OpenShift Service Mesh Ambient Mode - Workshop

Explore OpenShift Service Mesh - Ambient Mode, based on Istio service mesh without sidecars.

About this workshop

This is a hands-on lab/workshop focused on OpenShift Service Mesh Ambient Mode — a modern service mesh approach on Red Hat OpenShift based on Istio’s ambient mode architecture.

Ambient mode lets you operate a service mesh without injecting sidecar proxies into every workload, instead using a lightweight per-node proxy (ztunnel) and optional Layer-7 proxies called waypoints — reducing overhead and simplifying adoption.

The content is structured as sequential modules that guide you through setup, observability, tracing, deploying workloads, traffic management, resilience features, and security policies.

This workshop is mainly for cloud-native platform engineers, DevOps teams, developers and SREs who are:

  • Deploying or managing service meshes on Red Hat OpenShift.

  • Interested in learning about ambient mode as an alternative to traditional sidecar-based Istio service mesh.

  • Wanting to learn how to observe, secure, trace, and manage traffic in a sidecar-less environment.

  • Hands-on practitioners who can access an OpenShift cluster and execute the lab steps.

  • It assumes familiarity with Kubernetes/OpenShift fundamentals and service mesh concepts before diving into the hands-on modules.