Indeed, it is another level of indirection, and I’m all for it (having introduced a custom service mesh based on envoy into the company I work for having ~100 m

Indeed, it is another level of indirection, and I’m all for it (having introduced a custom service mesh based on envoy into the company I work for having ~100 microservices, though it took more like 2-3 months of me working solo). It’s a great way to get a uniform metrics and troubleshooting experience. Most important though, especially if you have strategically compiled binaries as microservices, a service mesh lets you roll out improved routing logic easily because it’s all abstracted away, not encoded in client libraries in X number of languages. Same for tracing. Wanna add a field to all traces being generated? Go recompile and redeploy a 100 services... or change one service mesh config. Other than that, envoy can usually withstand much more traffic than the service it overlays, so you can use it to provide DoS protection in depth, by limiting on service proxies everywhere. Saved us a couple outage escalations already.