USCIS is requesting for Harness SMP to also support Istio in Ambient Mode to enable lighter, more efficient service mesh deployments in EKS. Our understanding is that currently Harness SMP is only supporting Istio Envoy Gateway.

Istio in Ambient Mode eliminates the need for sidecar proxies, reducing resource consumption and operational complexity.

Adopting Istio in Ambient Mode also aligns with industry trends and enhances Harness’s value for EKS users.

Enabling Istio in Ambient Mode will help USCIS and other Harness SMP customers optimize their cloud infrastructure and accelerate application development.

It is our understanding that Matt Moran from Harness already opened a Harness internal ticket number CXE-2231 related to this USCIS request.

USCIS Git Issue Ticket # for this request is 198