TL;DR

Aspen Mesh provides a simpler and more powerful distribution of Istio.

As I understand it, it’s basically some company that decided to provide a pre-packaged and commercially supported distribution of the open source Istio project:

A fully supported, tested and hardened distribution of Istio that makes it viable to operate service mesh in the enterprise.

Enough for now, I’ll hopefully add more about the service mesh as I learn more about it 😅