IMHO the operational cost of a service mesh only really makes sense in the context of Kubernetes. A service mesh works by deploying lots of proxies everywhere;

IMHO the operational cost of a service mesh only really makes sense in the context of Kubernetes. A service mesh works by deploying lots of proxies everywhere; in Kubernetes you can do that very cheaply but outside of Kubernetes you're going to have to do some work. So: I would start with installing something like Linkerd in a Kubernetes environment and work outwards from there.