In ambient mode, the CNI plugin is effectively just a shim to catch pod creation events and notify the CNI agent early enough to set up network redirection before the pod is fully started. This is necessary because the CNI plugin is effectively the first thing to see a scheduled pod - before the K8S control plane will see things like the pod IP or networking info, the CNI will - but the CNI plugin alone is not sufficient to handle all pod events (already-started...

```console
helm install istio-ingressgateway istio/gateway --set profile=openshift
```

### `image: auto` Information

The image used by the chart, `auto`, may be unintuitive.
This exists because the pod spec will be automatically populated at runtime, using the same mechanism as [Sidecar Injection](istio.io/latest/docs/setup/additional-setup/sidecar-injection).