In the above example, that's where Docker networking would come in (load balancing, health checks, transparent encryption of traffic) for many of those concerns

In the above example, that's where Docker networking would come in (load balancing, health checks, transparent encryption of traffic) for many of those concerns. Not all of them, unless you'd want to run a web server sidecar for your apps, which would be very much like a slightly simplified implementation of a service mesh anyways! Then again, in my eyes the "sweet spot" of simple architecture is something like: [users] <==> [ingress] <==> [service] <==> [database/message queue/key-value store] with maybe some middleware. If you have a lot of traffic between the internal services, then maybe your architecture mandates a more fully fledged solution.