Consul is just Service discovery. Istio adds a service mesh in which you can introduce all sorts of routing like 1% traffic to a canary, dark deploy on another

Consul is just Service discovery. Istio adds a service mesh in which you can introduce all sorts of routing like 1% traffic to a canary, dark deploy on another route, etc. also mTLS authentication and authorization. I think consul came out with Consul Connect to compete but I’m not too familiar with that. Also Istio just runs in your cluster effortlessly instead of needing some VMs for Consul.