When someone first hears about Istio’s sidecar concept, the first two questions are usually about its effect on resource consumption and request latency or throughput. In this post we’ll discuss the first of those questions: resource consumption of Istio proxies and how it can be reduced with the new Sidecar custom resource. Previously we had a Kafka on Istio benchmark post that was about throughput, and we’ll take a deeper look at the most important HTTP request metrics in a forthcoming article (stay tuned).