The Istio load tests mesh consists of 1000 services and 2000 sidecars with 70,000 mesh-wide requests per second. Istio Google, IBM, and Microsoft rely on Istio as the default service mesh that is offered in their respective Kubernetes cloud services. Consul Connect, by contrast, has a pluggable architecture for its data plane that allows different proxies to be used. Every pod needs to be tracked, and Istio needs to aggregate and provide information about all of the pods. Istio vs. While Istio claims to support a variety of environments and frameworks, in practice, it is only well supported on Kubernetes, making it one of the narrower service mesh options. The project was initially sponsored by Google, Lyft and IBM, and uses an extended version of the Envoy proxy, which is deployed as a sidecar to the relevant service in the same Kubernetes pod. Since its release, we’ve been big fans of the Envoy Proxyfor adding resilience and observability to microservice architectures. By default, Istio uses Envoy as its data plane even though it is designed to work with other proxies such as Nginx. Istio, Lyft Envoy, and microservices. Platform Support. Envoy.

At the time of writing Istio has 11.5k Github stars, 244 contributors and is backed by Lyft, Google and IBM.
Istio vs. Although Istio was written to support Kubernetes originally, it is not tied to Kubernetes and can be run on any platform, including in a hybrid architecture across multiple platforms.

Istio. Istio uses the Envoy proxy to perform this function, which appears to be the best-documented and best-supported choice. Istio's Envoy proxies can now send telemetry to Prometheus or Stackdriver without first having to install, run and scale Mixer instances. Linkerd provides its own proxy. 10/09/2019; 2 minutes to read; In this article Overview. For the control plane: Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel must be deployed and for the data plane an Envoy sidecar is deployed.
Istio uses a version of Envoy, though heavily extended, to perform the monitoring, management, and logging. Every pod needs to be tracked, and Istio needs to aggregate and provide information about all of the pods. Service Mesh Candidate 1: Istio.

Envoy separates out its “routing” concerns (picking which cluster to talk to) from the communication to the actual backend clusters. Istio is K8S native as well it's actively developed when k8s was successfully accepted with production-ready apps whereas Kong slowly migrated to start leveraging K8s. Istio is stable and feature rich. Service Mesh: Moving from bare-bones Envoy to Istio.