The Hidden Cost of scaling with Istio 1.20 and OpenShift: Benchmark

The Hidden Cost of Scaling with Istio 1.20 and OpenShift: Benchmark Results Service mesh adoption has accelerated as organizations shift to microservices on Kubernetes platforms like Red Hat OpenShift. Istio remains the most widely used service mesh, with its 1.20 release introducing long-awaited features including WebAssembly (Wasm) plugin support, enhanced telemetry pipelines, and improved multi-cluster federation. However, as teams scale workloads to thousands of pods, hidden costs of running