This document discusses Istio, an open source service mesh that provides traffic management, telemetry and security for microservices. It notes that as microservices grow in complexity, they require features like load balancing, monitoring and failure recovery. Istio addresses this by providing a service mesh layer that handles these functions and allows developers to focus on business logic rather than infrastructure. The document outlines Istio's key features such as automatic load balancing, rich routing rules, access controls, metrics and tracing. It also describes Istio's architecture, including its control plane that manages configuration and a data plane where Envoy proxies handle traffic.