/a>. Similar to the way containers provide an interface that applications can directly consume, AppSwitch plugs directly into well-defined and ubiquitous network API that applications currently use and directly connects application clients to appropriate servers, skipping all intermediate layers. In the end, that&rsquo;s what networking is all about.</p><p>Before going into the details of how AppSwitch promises to remove unnecessary layers from the Istio stack, let me give a very brief introduction to its a