Service mesh platform that provides traffic management, security, and observability for microservices. Like having a smart traffic control system for communication between application components.
A company uses Istio to automatically encrypt all communication between their microservices and monitor performance.
Istio is an open-source service mesh typically deployed on Kubernetes. Cloud equivalents provide similar service-to-service traffic management, mTLS security, and telemetry. AWS App Mesh is AWS’s managed mesh (Envoy-based) but is not Istio. Google Anthos Service Mesh is a Google-managed distribution of Istio. Azure’s closest historical offering was Open Service Mesh (OSM), which was a different mesh (not Istio) and is now archived; AKS commonly runs Istio via community or partner distributions rather than a single native Azure service. OCI does not have a direct first-party Istio-equivalent service; Istio is commonly self-managed on OKE.