Microservices transformed the way we organise and build potentially thousands of connected services. But as they grow in size and complexity, it can become difficult to efficiently manage, understand and keep them performant as a whole. We need to think about service discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, circuit breaking, metrics, tracing, rate limiting, canary deployments, security, monitoring, and more. Implementing and especially managing it in every single microservice separately would be unsustainable and unnecessarily hard, especially when we have different languages and frameworks. Instead, why don’t we let the platform handle it and establish a service mesh underneath the microservices. In this talk, we’ll explain what a service mesh is and use Istio to explore how it can help us address and configure all of the requirements in a single manageable way everyone can understand and act on. All while the microservices themselves are none the wiser of what’s happening beneath them.