What is the purpose of Istio Service Mesh ?

The VCF 9.0 Service Mesh Integration Guide defines Istio as: “ Istio Service Mesh provides an infrastructure layer that transparently handles service-to-service communication, securing, observing, and controlling traffic between microservices. ” The key purpose is enabling structured and observable communication between applications. While Istio includes discovery and load balancing, those are features, not the overarching purpose. A centralized routing table (Option D) is not the core definition. VMware documentation highlights Istio’s role in service-to-service communication, observability, and policy enforcement within the service mesh. Therefore, the correct answer is B .