The use cases for Istio/Envoy or any other Service Mesh is that they comprise a set of far higher-level capabilities. Routing Policy Enforcement, mTLS, Circuit

The use cases for Istio/Envoy or any other Service Mesh is that they comprise a set of far higher-level capabilities. Routing Policy Enforcement, mTLS, Circuit Breakers, Certificate Management, Traffic Tracing and Visualization, and many many more features [0][1]. I love me some HAProxy too, but it only operates at the level of a single service/backend group or lists of relatively independent services/backend groups. Services Meshes intend to make deploying dozens, hundreds, thousands of complex services in cohesive and consistent fashions such that they form one or more applications or APIs. [0] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.5/service_mesh/v1x/ossm-architecture.html#ossm-architecture-1x_ossm-architecture-v1x https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.5/service_me... [1] https://istio.io/latest/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/ https://istio.io/latest/docs/concepts/what-is-istio/