Google, IBM, and Lyft formed Istio (Jason McGee) in May 2017, and it is one of the fastest-growing service mesh projects that's been built for the Kubernetes platform. This open source project is available at https://github.com/istio.

Istio has a centralized control plane that manages and coordinates data collection with the data plane. Istio Pilot is a core part of the Istio control plane and can run outside the Kubernetes environment as a standalone service. It supports integration with VMs and service discovery through other third-party service catalogs such as Consul or Eureka.