Tetrate Istio Distro, the industry’s most popular open source Istio distribution, is developed and supported by the creators and maintainers of Istio and Envoy. Distributions are hardened, performant and full distributions of the upstream Istio project. You can work quickly and confidently knowing you’re installing certified versions of Istio, tested for compatibility with your production clusters.
Tetrate maintains each release for up to 14 months, providing security updates and other enhancements to the release. Tetrate Istio Distro is also rigorously tested against multiple different Kubernetes distributions to ensure continual functional integrity and smooth upgrade experiences as well as being vetted and tested against all major cloud platforms.

WIth Tetrate Istio Distro you get:

• Hardened, performant, and fully upstream builds of Istio
• Compatibility testing for the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Integrations with cloud native and popular on-prem certificate managers (e.g., AWS ACM, Venafi, etc)
• Custom builds of Istio for ARM64 and AMD64
• Security updates backported to supported versions

Tetrate Istio Subscription includes lifecycle and change management tooling, including the GetMesh CLI, that ensures the use of supported and vetted versions of Istio. It also enables organizations the ability to control Istio versioning, support multiple versions of Istio, easily move between the versions, integrate with cloud providers’ certification systems and centralize config management and validation. 
WIth the Istio Lifecycle Management and GetMesh CLI you get:

• The easiest way of installing, operating, upgrading and troubleshooting operations
• Options include the ability to install FIPS-verified Istio and Envoy builds
• Certified versions of Istio, tested for compatibility with your production clusters
• Uses cloud provider certificate management systems to create Istio CA certs