Service mesh solutions like Istio / Consul Connect+Vault can help a lot with this. Depending on the existing size and complexity of your stack those months can

Service mesh solutions like Istio / Consul Connect+Vault can help a lot with this. Depending on the existing size and complexity of your stack those months can be cut down to weeks or even days. I don't mean to trivialize the time and expertise needed to set up and manage, but if you can afford to run a microservice architecture on k8s already it's definitely not untenable.