The idea of a “service mesh” has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years and the number of alternatives available has risen. There are multiple service mesh open-source projects: Istio, Linkerd, Envoy and Conduit which can be deployed on any Kubernetes environment. The AWS App Mesh can be used with microservices running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), and Kubernetes running on Amazon EC2.
The significant difference between the other solutions and App Mesh is that AWS manages the control plane and users can attach any application to the mesh just by deploying the data plane with microservices.
Source: itnext.io