title: Istio vs Service Mesh Interface
body: <p>I would have a conceptual question. I can not figure it out how Istio and Service Mesh Interface come together.</p>
  <p>Service Mesh Interface' goal is to have a standard way of defining service mesh related features (traffic split, metrics collection, etc..). To able to to this, Service Mesh Interface provides different CRDs (for example:  metrics.smi-spec.io).</p>
  <p>However, Istio has its own CRDs and API extensions.</p>
  <p>I am confused a bit. Is Istio using under the hood the APIs (for example the metrics.smi-spec.io) provided by the Service Mesh Interface? Or what is the connection between these two?</p>