The key insight? If you miss the foundation phase, large communities become glorified help desks. Your early adopters are your future evangelists, so invest in them first.

What's been your experience building developer communities? Drop your thoughts below! 👇

𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗟𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀:

1. Avoid the "support center trap" where engagement dies

2. Balance support queries with continuous engagement

3. Leverage demand gen opportunities while maintaining community spirit

4. Scale content efforts strategically (freelancers, agencies, champions)

1. Focus on trust and genuine belonging

2. Create easy access (Slack links with clear CTAs on page)

3. Invest in community hours, swag, and appreciation

4. Build your initial champions who become your growth engine

5. Establish regular meet-and-greets with actionable content

this is so cool

Features like multi-cluster, multi-network, and VM support are still in development (track progress on GitHub issues like #54245), but my take is that Ambient Mode’s lightweight design and cost efficiency make it a game-changer for scaling clusters without breaking the bank.

The Benefits?

→ Less Resource Consumption and Cost Savings

→ Reduced disruption as upgrades can be selectively rolled out without affecting the entire application

→ Configure L7/L4 as needed according to requirements with a modular architecture.

So by breaking them you can choose your components and remove the entire overhead of sidecars. For example, just required mTLS? Use Ztunnel and not the entire stack, while using up to 73% less CPU than sidecar mode.

→ Waypoint Proxy: Basically Envoy proxy deployed at the namespace level that enables advanced traffic management (l7) features when needed. Acts as a communication channel between Ztunnel when enabled with the help of Ambient Mode.

→ Ztunnel (Zero-Trust Tunnel): For L4 Operations that runs on each node, creating a secure mTLS overlay between different nodes via itself.

→ Operational complexity is another pain point. Upgrading Istio requires restarting every application pod to update the sidecar version so your application would have been down while upgrading the mesh

Ambient mode introduces a split architecture that breaks the sidecar into two distinct component

→ The main challenge? Resource overhead. With one sidecar per pod, a cluster with 1,000 pods requires 1,000 sidecars consuming CPU and RAM. By default, Istio recommends allocating 0.1 CPU cores and 128MB of memory per sidecar.

In Istio's traditional sidecar architecture, each application pod runs alongside an Envoy proxy that handles all network traffic. This battle-tested approach has been around since Istio's first release in 2017.