stable version in place and gradually migrate apps to the new version.

- More flexibility: the new installer allows multiple 'environments', allowing applications to select
a set of control plane settings and components. While the entire mesh respects the same APIs and config,
apps may target different 'environments' which contain different instances and variants of Istio.

Fundamentally, this component is responsible for the following:

- Sets up redirection with newly-started (or newly-added, previously-started) application pods such that traffic from application pods is forwarded to the local node's ztunnel pod.
- Configures required iptables, sockets, and packet routing miscellanea within the `ztunnel` and application pod network namespaces to make that happen.

This component accomplishes that in the following ways:

         alt="Istio logo" title="Istio" height="100" width="100" />
</a>

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Istio is an open source service mesh that layers transparently onto existing distributed applications. Istio’s powerful features provide a uniform and more efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the path to load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring – with few or no service code changes.

- [HorizontalPodAutoscaler](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/)
- [PodDisruptionBudget](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/disruptions/#how-disruption-budgets-work)
- [pod annotations](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/annotations/)
- [container environment variables](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/inject-data-application/define-environment-variable-container/)