[crb]

Contour is a gateway: a controller that manages Envoy proxies at the edge of a Kubernetes environment. Istio is a service mesh: a controller that manages Envoy proxies at the edge and alongside each workload. If you are using Istio, you probably don't need Contour.

A year ago, a number of Envoy gateway maintainers (including Contour) announced their intention to join up to build one implementation of an Envoy gateway. They haven't made a lot of noise since, but they are apparently up to v0.4.

https://blogs.vmware.com/opensource/2022/05/16/contour-and-c...

You can also use the Gateway API to manage Istio. So, if you are using Istio, you probably don't need Envoy Gateway either.

Wherever you look, it's still Envoy. Unless of course you look at Linkerd, who have their own thing.