Blog/ambient mc

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content/en/blog/2025/ambient-multicluster/index.md

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+---
+title: Introducing multicluster support for ambient mode (alpha)
+description: Istio 1.27 adds alpha ambient multicluster support, extending ambient's familiar lightweight, modular architecture to deliver secure connectivity, discovery and load balancing across clusters.
+date: 2025-08-04
+attribution: Jackie Maertens (Microsoft), Keith Mattix (Microsoft), Mikhail Krinkin (Microsoft), Steven Jin (Microsoft)
+keywords: [ambient,multicluster]
+---
+
+Multicluster has been one of the most requested features of ambient -— and as of Istio 1.27, it is available in alpha status!
+We sought to capture the benefits and avoid the complications of multicluster architectures while using the same modular design that ambient users love.
+This release brings the core functionality of a multicluster mesh and lays the groundwork for a richer feature set in upcoming releases.
+
+## The Power & Complexity of Multicluster
+
+Multicluster architectures increase outage resilience, shrink your blast radius, and scale across data centers.
+That said, integrating multiple clusters poses connectivity, security, and operational challenges.
+
+In a single Kubernetes cluster, every pod can directly connect to another pod via a unique pod IP or service VIP.
+These guarantees break down in multicluster architectures;
+IP address spaces of different clusters might overlap,
+and even without overlap, the underlying infrastructure would need configuration to route cross-cluster traffic.
+
+Cross-cluster connectivity also presents security challenges.
+Pod-to-pod traffic will leave cluster boundaries and pods will accept connections from outside their cluster.
+Without identity verification at the edge of the cluster and strong encryption,
+an outside attacker could exploit a vulnerable pod or intercept unencrypted traffic.
+
+A multicluster solution must securely connect clusters and do so
+through simple, declarative APIs that keep pace with dynamic environments where clusters are frequently added and removed.
+
+## Key Components
+
+Ambient multicluster extends ambient with new components and minimal APIs to
+securely connect clusters using ambient's lightweight, modular architecture.
+It builds on the {{< gloss "namespace sameness" >}}namespace sameness{{< /gloss >}} model
+so services keep their existing DNS names across clusters, allowing you to control cross-cluster communication without changing application code.
+
+### East-West Gateways
+
+Each cluster has an east-west gateway with a globally routable IP acting as an entry point for cross-cluster communication.
+A ztunnel connects to the remote cluster's east-west gateway, identifying the destination service by its namespaced name.
+The east-west gateway then load balances the connection to a local pod.
+Using the east-west gateway's routable IP removes the need for inter-cluster routing configuration,
+and addressing pods by namespaced name rather than IP eliminates issues with overlapping IP spaces.
+Together, these design choices enable cross-cluster connectivity without changing cluster networking or restarting workloads,
+even as clusters are added or removed.
+
+### Double HBONE
+
+Ambient multicluster uses nested [HBONE](/docs/ambient/architecture/hbone) connections to efficiently secure traffic traversing cluster boundaries.
+An outer HBONE connection encrypts traffic to the east-west gateway and allows the source ztunnel and east-west gateway to verify each other's identity.
+An inner HBONE connection encrypts traffic end-to-end, which allows the source ztunnel and destination ztunnel to verify each other's identity.
+At the same time, the HBONE layers allow ztunnel to effectively reuse cross-cluster connections, minimizing TLS handshakes.
+
+{{< image link="./mc-ambient-traffic-flow.png" caption="Istio ambient multicluster traffic flow" >}}
+
+### Service Discovery and Scope
+
+Marking a service global enables cross-cluster communication.
+Istiod configures east-west gateways to accept and route global service traffic to local pods and
+programs ztunnels to load balance global service traffic to remote clusters.
+
+Mesh administrators define the label-based criteria for global services via the `ServiceScope` API,
+and app developers label their services accordingly.
+The default `ServiceScope` is
+
+{{< text yaml >}}
+serviceScopeConfigs:
+  - servicesSelector:
+      matchExpressions:
+        - key: istio.io/global
+          operator: In
+          values: ["true"]
+    scope: GLOBAL
+{{< /text >}}
+
+meaning that any service with the `istio.io/global=true` label is global.
+Although the default value is straightforward, the `ServiceScope` API can express complex conditions using a mix of ANDs and ORs.
+
+By default, ztunnel load balances traffic uniformly across all endpoints --even remote ones--,
+but this is configurable through the service's `trafficDistribution` field to only cross cluster boundaries when there are no local endpoints.
+Thus, users have control over whether and when traffic crosses cluster boundaries with no changes to application code.
+
+## Limitations and Roadmap
+
+Although the current implementation of ambient multicluster has the foundational features for a multicluster solution,
+there is still a lot of work to be done.
+We are looking to improve the following areas
+
+* Service and waypoint configuration must be uniform across all clusters.
+* No cross-cluster L7 failover (L7 policy is applied at the destination cluster).
+* No support for direct pod addressing or headless services.
+* Support only for multi-primary deployment model.
+* Support only for one network per cluster deployment model.
+
+We are also looking to improve our reference documentation, guides, testing, and performance.
+
+If you would like to try out ambient multicluster, please follow [this guide](/docs/ambient/install/multicluster).
+Remember, this feature is in alpha status and not ready for production use.
+We welcome your bug reports, thoughts, comments, and use cases -- you can reach us on [GitHub](https://github.com/istio/istio) or [Slack](https://istio.slack.com/).