Running a production ready service mesh is VERY hard. From fully understanding the mesh architecture and installing it, to how to scale, upgrade, monitor, secure, and so on, it can take many months to build confidence to release it into production.

For more than 2 years, our Traffic team has been running a large scale, Istio based service mesh. We faced tons of problems during the many phases of a project this big. From picking initial features to choose the Mesh architecture, to thinking on how to hide Mesh complexity details from users to when to promote the mesh to production.

In this talk we want to share the biggest stumbles in a variety of subjects related to operation, maintenance, training, monitoring and abstraction of our Mesh solution. We believe that by sharing some, hard to find, tips and tricks, people and organizations can save a lot of time adopting Service Mesh.

Join us in this minefield called Service Mesh and learn how to avoid the main dangers of it.