[ceposta07]

I think it does come down to risk and risk mitigation. As someone who works for an “Istio vendor” we see some of the largest deployments of Istio in the world for mission critical/tier-0 workloads… and all the steps it took to get there including evaluation/POC of other vendors/mesh technologies.

Part of these decisions are based on things like “What is the rest of the industry doing?” “How vibrant/diverse is the community?” “How mature is the project _for enterprise adoption_?” “What vendors are available for enterprise support?” “Is it already available in my platform of choice?” etc.etc.

The sting of “picking the wrong container orchestrator” is still fresh in a lot of organizations.

We see Istio make it through these questions with good answers for a lot of organizations where other/alternative service mesh vendors strike out pretty quickly.

This is even before we get to the “feature comparisons” for usecases these large organizations focus on/have.