a> below.</p><h2 id=background>Background</h2><p>In the service mesh world, using Istio as the control plane has become the mainstream. Because Istio was built on Envoy, it uses Envoy&rsquo;s data plane <a href=https://blog.envoyproxy.io/the-universal-data-plane-api-d15cec7a>APIs</a> (collectively known as the xDS APIs). These APIs have been standardized separately from Envoy, and so by implementing them in MOSN, we are able to drop in MOSN as a replacement for Envoy. Istio&rsquo;s integration of third-part