A common question that people ask is “should I use Ambassador if I’m using a service mesh (usually Istio)?” After all, both Ambassador and Istio are built on the Envoy Proxy. Moreover, Istio recently added support for explicitly managing ingress with the Gateway abstraction. So, do you need an API Gateway if you’re using a service mesh?
Ambassador (and API Gateways in general) focus on north/south traffic, i.e., traffic into your data center. Istio (and other service meshes) handle east/west traffic, i.e., traffic between services in your data center. If your service mesh already manages L7 traffic, can you use it for managing north/south traffic?
