Istio has a big service mesh lead, but only among a segment of early adopters. Among those already using a service mesh in production, 63% have adopted Istio, which is more than twice as many as Linkerd according to our analysis of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) survey earlier this year. Besides HashiCorp’s Consul, no other option broke double digits.
Istio isn’t as intimidating if you strip away the fact that it is commonly deployed along with Envoy, which has undeniably done well recently. Production use of the Envoy project among the CNCF community rose from 17% in 2019 to 24% in 2020. Those evaluating the project dropped from 35% to 21%, which may mean that many organizations considered and rejected Envoy, which can have implications for future service mesh adoption. Not everyone associates Envoy with service proxy or ingress control. When the survey screened for the adoption of this functionality, only 18% used Envoy in a production or evaluation situation