Istio Ambient is not a "Node Proxy"

The common messaging around Istio Ambient Mesh is that is a "node proxy." For example, from The New Stack ... architecture that moves the proxy functionality from the pod-level to the node-level. While this is technically accurate, it is misleading and really missing the point and benefits of Ambient. A brief history of service mesh architectures This skips quite a bit of information, but is close enough. One of the earlier service meshes on the market was Linkerd 1 - not to be confused with Linkerd 2, which most people just call "Linkerd" today. Linkerd 1 was a per-node proxy that did all the service mesh functionality we know and love, at the node level.