Everyone is talking Istio/Envoy but what's up with HAProxy? Last I looked(about a year or so ago) they were making huge advancements in platform at every level and in particular extensibility. It looked all open source too.
I love me some HAProxy too, but it only operates at the level of a single service/backend group or lists of relatively independent services/backend groups. Services Meshes intend to make deploying dozens, hundreds, thousands of complex services in cohesive and consistent fashions such that they form one or more applications or APIs.
[0] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.5/service_me...