Service Mesh is becoming a key component in the Cloud Native world. It allows teams to connect, secure and observe complex microservices environments built on containers and container orchestration tools. But most Service Mesh tools are also very complex and require a lot of engineering overhead to deploy and maintain. In this talk, we will explore the considerations you have to take into account before you commit to a Service Mesh-based stack. I had the opportunity to help customers design around Istio (one of the most famous Mesh tools) and learned a lot through the years. This talk is a distilled experience of the learnings I had.