https://istio.io/docs/ops/architecture/#pilot

Pilot provides service discovery for the Envoy sidecars, traffic management capabilities for intelligent routing (e.g., A/B tests, canary rollouts, etc.), and resiliency (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, etc.).

Pilot converts high level routing rules that control traffic behavior into Envoy-specific configurations, and propagates them to the sidecars at runtime. Pilot abstracts platform-specific service discovery mechanisms and synthesizes them into a standard format that any sidecar conforming with the Envoy API can consume.