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 (or VMs) rather than a single cloud-provider service. Each major cloud offers managed Istio-compatible service mesh options (often based on Envoy) that provide similar traffic management, mTLS security, and observability features, but the exact product names and feature sets differ by provider and change over time.