If you’re in the Kubernetes space, it’s highly likely you’ve at least heard of service mesh technology. Conference talks and technical articles abound with buzzwords like Istio, Linkerd, mTLS, and service discovery. In this talk, we’ll go back to the basics and talk about the core of what a service mesh is and the kinds of organizations on which a service mesh will have the greatest impact. When you leave, you should be able to answer the Shakespeare-inspired question: To Mesh or not to Mesh?