2 min lesson
The honest counterpoint
Take this situation: "An interviewer says the team has 5 microservices and asks whether you'd install Istio with sidecars to get mTLS and retries. What's a strong answer?" Lead with your decision, then add the reason.
Step 1 of 3
The honest counterpointwhen NOT to run a mesh
A mesh adds a control plane to operate, upgrade and debug; it adds latency; and it makes failures harder to reason about because the proxy is now in the path of every request. For a small number of services, you can get mTLS from the edge plus app-level TLS, retries from a shared client library and traffic splitting from the ingress alone - without the mesh tax.
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
Same capabilities, two ways to get them - match the tool to the actual problem.