Service meshes, such as those incorporating Envoy, are essential in modern microservices architectures for managing traffic, enhancing observability, and ensuring security and reliability without modifying individual applications. They consist of a control plane, which defines policies like mutual TLS and traffic routing, and data planes, which enforce these policies by managing traffic flow between workloads. Envoy, originally developed by Lyft and now part of the CNCF, serves as a high-performance data plane due to its dynamic configurability, support for multiple load balancing algorithms, and advanced protocol compatibility. This structure allows organizations to focus on application development by delegating complex network management tasks to the service mesh, with Envoy being a popular choice for many implementations, including those by Kong's Kuma and Kong Mesh.