In this chapter, we covered the high-level attributes of the Istio, Linkerd, and Consul service meshes and their capability matrices. We also covered managed service mesh providers and the support services that are available for each service mesh, as well as for the ones that are not included in this book.

Moving forward, you will notice that there will be three separate sections regarding the implementation details for Istio, Linkerd, and Consul. We will provide hands-on exercises that will help you to understand each service mesh implementation. To this end, the information that's present in this chapter will be of great help to you. We will go through the capabilities of each control plane for Istio, Linkerd, and Consul in their upcoming sections in this book. 

In the next chapter, we will cover the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification and SPIFFE, which promises to provide interoperability between different service meshes and the concept of a strong identity.