[rshriram]

The overlap with Linkerd is around routing, resilience, metrics/tracing, and the deployment model (at high level).

Our deployment model is a bit more transparent. Traffic gets transparently routed via Envoy, without using HTTP_PROXY or direct addressing of sidecars. This implies zero change to application code.

Secondly, Istio brings two more things to the table: policy enforcement (rate limits, ACLs, etc.), and authentication/authorization. Istio enables mutual TLS auth between services with automatic certificate management. The policy plane is extensible, where you can plug in adapters or specific policy implementations.