- In ambient mode, the CNI plugin does not configure any networking, but is only responsible for synchronously pushing new pod events back up to an ambient watch server which runs as part of the Istio CNI node agent. The ambient server will find the pod netns and configure networking inside that pod via iptables. The ambient server...

- Better security: separate Istio components reside in different namespaces, allowing different teams or
roles to manage different parts of Istio. For example, a security team would maintain the
root CA and policy, a telemetry team may only have access to Prometheus,
and a different team may maintain the control plane components (which are highly security sensitive).

The install is organized in 'environments' - each environment consists of a set of components

API rather than command line.

### Quick tour of CLI commands

#### Flags

The `istioctl` command supports the following flags:

- `dry-run`: console output only, nothing applied to cluster or written to files.
- `verbose`: display entire manifest contents and other debug info (default is false).
- `set`: select profile or override profile defaults

#### Basic default manifest

Installation in `kube-system` is recommended to ensure the [`system-node-critical`](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/guaranteed-scheduling-critical-addon-pods/)
`priorityClassName` can be used. You can install in other namespace only on K8S clusters that allow
'system-node-critical' outside of kube-system.

## Configuration

To view support configuration options and documentation, run:

```console
helm show values istio/istio-cni
```