Perform a time boxed evaluation of the work and timeline for OSSM to support external services (VMs or bare metal services). 

Include:

• Upstream feature review - would it work for us? What would we do differently? Obvious work required? What Istio release to target?
• How could proxy deployment work? RPMs, containers or both?
• How could the network setup work - how is traffic routed through the proxy? How is istiod exposed to external proxies?
• Documentation impacts (What would we need to document?)
• QE Impacts (What would we need to QE - test matrix, etc? Any impact of different architectures? Different OCP releases? Can it be fully tested on a single OCP cluster?)
• Target Istio 1.11 and document any differences between 1.11 and 1.12/master
• Consider existing plans around VM integration in the upstream Istio community.
• How to support different types of VMs (e.g. Windows VM, different Linux distros, etc) - would we have to explicitly test and support each one?
• Short summary of what next steps should be

Outcome: A brief written outline (a few paragraphs?) of the work required to support external services as part of a Service Mesh with a ball park estimate that takes into account both our own and upstream release cadence. - ideally with a proposed timeline and work breakdown. This will be used to write a customer facing description on our plans for external VMs that will be part of the roadmap.

Time Box: 3 days