Istio, Linkerd, and Consul are the three service mesh providers that we will cover in this book. Istio started its nascent revolution of microservices communication with an active community of contributors that have provided a very feature-rich service mesh. Linkerd, with its 2.x version, focuses on simplicity, ease of use, and performance. Finally, the Consul service mesh spans VMs, Kubernetes clusters, data centers, and regions. Each of these service mesh providers can fulfill service mesh needs based on specific requirements.

In this chapter, we will walk through a quick overview of the aforementioned open source projects, followed by a quick comparison of them. We will cover the following topics:

• Introducing service mesh providers
• A quick comparison
• Support services