One thing to keep in mind is that Linkerd is pretty much strictly k8s only one while Istio and Consul Connect have first-class support for out-of-cluster services as well as e.g. Nomad. Relying on linkerd digs you waaay deeper into k8s lock-in.
This may be fully acceptable for you, but should not be glossed over.
From my experience, linkerd had the most seamless deployment to get to the most feature-complete out-of-the box experience with monitoring etc. But as it goes with these things there’s a much bigger amortized cost in terms of magic to unwind if you need to integrate it.
Re:NSA Kubernetes Hardening Guidance [pdf]
by williamallthing on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @06:36PM
(#28067333)
Mesh expansion is on the Linkerd roadmap, which will make it possible to run the data plane outside of Kubernetes.
As far as a service mesh, check out Linkerd! I find Istio much harder to setup and manage. Linkerd is super simple and has always worked pretty much out of the box for me.
https://linkerd.io/