Explore the present and future of Istio in this 40-minute conference talk by Mitch Conners from Google and Lin Sun from Solo.io. Dive into Istio's impact on Cloud Native development, focusing on Application Networking concerns such as Routing, Security, and Observability. Learn about ongoing efforts to simplify service mesh operations and discover an exciting new model for running data planes. Gain insights into reducing resource usage and improving CVE exposure control through the ambient sidecarless topology. As Istio's first maintainer session as an official CNCF Incubating Project, this talk offers valuable information for developers and end users interested in cloud-native technologies.