I don’t understand the statement “It includes a built-in proxy with a larger performance trade off for ease of use.” what is a larger performer trade off? larger than? what’s a large trade off?
And in general I’m curious about directionally how people see consul and istio converging (from my recollection of early istio, consul always was one of the possible service registry, but it seems now consul tries to ‘compete’ with istio feature by feature? (not that competition is bad, specially if it yields a better system in the end, but fragmentation can be an issue too))
We have not conducted any formal performance testing of the built-in proxy against Envoy, nginx, or HAProxy, etc. Those proxies are generally considered to be well engineered and are written for high performance. The built-in proxy is not. It was built to be used during testing/development of Consul, and is not recommended for production deployments; we recommend Envoy for that (https://www.consul.io/docs/connect/proxies/envoy).
Given that the built-in proxy is not optimized for performance, we would expect to see considerable performance differences compared to production-grade proxies.
I’ll hold off on answering the second question as I’m curious to see the response from others in the community. I will just say that while other service meshes have some overlap with Consul’s features, it is not Consul’s goal to try to have feature parity with each of those solutions. Different service meshes in the market offer different feature sets. Consumers should evaluate and select the solution which best meets their business and/or technical requirements.