Service meshes are becoming increasingly popular in cloud-native applications as they provide a way to manage network traffic between microservices. Istio, one of the most popular service meshes, uses Envoy as its data plane. However, to maintain the stability and reliability of modern web-scale applications, organizations need more advanced load management capabilities. This is where Aperture comes in. It offers several features, including:

Prioritized load shedding: Drops traffic that is deemed less important to ensure that the most critical traffic is served.
Distributed rate-limiting: Prevents abuse and protects the service from excessive requests.
Intelligent autoscaling: Adjusts resource allocation based on demand and performance.
Monitoring and telemetry: Continuously monitors service performance and request attributes using an in-built telemetry system.
Declarative policies: Provides a policy language that enables teams to define how to react to different situations.

These capabilities help manage network traffic in a microservices architecture, prioritize critical requests, and ensure reliable operations at scale. Furthermore, the integration with Istio for flow control is seamless and without the need for application code changes.