**Describe alternatives you've considered**

**Affected product area (please put an X in all that apply)**

[ ] Ambient
[ ] Docs
[ ] Dual Stack
[ ] Installation
[ ] Networking
[ ] Performance and Scalability
[ ] Extensions and Telemetry
[ ] Security
[ ] Test and Release
[ ] User Experience
[ ] Developer Infrastructure

**Affected features (please put an X in all that apply)**

[ ] Multi Cluster

In the end, [after evaluation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c2123cKuYsBDpIon9FFdctWTUIMFweSjgwG7r8l3818/edit), the decision was to move forward with a Rust implementation.
This offered performance benefits that were too large to leave on the table, as well as opportunities to tune to our specific needs.

## Configuration protocol

#### Caching

# disable_pgv: disables protoc-gen-validation. This is not used buts adds many MB to Envoy protos
# not set vtprotobuf: this adds some performance improvement, but at a binary cost increase that is not worth it for the agent
AGENT_TAGS=agent,disable_pgv
# disable_pgv: disables protoc-gen-validation. This is not used buts adds many MB to Envoy protos

- [Project Conventions](https://github.com/istio/istio/wiki/Development-Conventions) - describes the conventions we use within the code base
- [Creating Fast and Lean Code](https://github.com/istio/istio/wiki/Writing-Fast-and-Lean-Code) - performance-oriented advice and guidelines for the code base

You'll find many other useful documents on our [Wiki](https://github.com/istio/istio/wiki).

## Introduction