In the rapidly evolving landscape of microservices and cloud-native architectures, service meshes like Istio have become essential for managing service-to-service communications. Istio has been a prominent player since its inception in 2017, and it was recently recognized as a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in July 2023, underscoring its maturity and widespread adoption. The article highlights discussions from KubeCon North America 2023, particularly focusing on Istio's innovative developments such as the Ambient Mesh, which allows applications to run without sidecars by utilizing a two-layered data plane architecture. This new approach addresses challenges like Layer 7 processing in multi-tenancy environments. The article also discusses Istio's roadmap, which is geared toward advancing Ambient Mesh to beta status, and Kubernetes updates such as Gateway API reaching general availability and native sidecar support. The diversity of projects within CNCF, including Istio, Linkerd, and Cilium, illustrates the community's commitment to providing varied options for different use cases, promoting sustainability and innovation in the service mesh domain.