What is the purpose of Istio Service Mesh?

The VCF 9.0 Service Mesh Integration Guide defines Istio as: “Istio Service Mesh provides an infrastructure layer that transparently handles service-to-service communication, securing, observing, and controlling traffic between microservices.” The key purpose is enabling structured and observable communication between applications. While Istio includes discovery and load balancing, those are features, not the overarching purpose. A centralized routing table (Option D) is not the core definition. VMware documentation highlights Istio’s role in service-to-service communication, observability, and policy enforcement within the service mesh. Therefore, the correct answer is B.