- 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...

controller as the CLI command `istioctl install` running in a loop in a pod in the cluster and using the config
from the in-cluster IstioOperator custom resource (CR).
There are two major differences:

1. The controller does not accept any dynamic user config through flags. All user interaction is through the
IstioOperator CR.
1. The controller has additional logic that mirrors istioctl commands like upgrade, but is driven from the declarative

```yaml
app: istio-gateway
istio: gateway # the release name with leading istio- prefix stripped
```

If your existing installation doesn't follow these names, you can override them. For example, if you have resources named `my-custom-gateway` with `selector` labels
`foo=bar,istio=ingressgateway`:

```yaml