Can someone help me to understand if service mesh itself is a type of ingress or if there is any difference between service mesh and ingress?
An "Ingress" is responsible for Routing Traffic into your Cluster (from the Docs: An API object that manages external access to the services in a cluster, typically HTTP.)
On the other side, a Service-Mesh is a tool that adds proxy-Containers as Sidecars to your Pods and Routs traffic between your Pods through those proxy-Containers.
use-Cases for Service-Meshes are i.E.