A service mesh gives you mTLS, traffic management, and observability without changing application code. It also gives you another piece of infrastructure to operate, debug, and explain to new hires. Here’s how to tell whether the trade-off is worth it.
Before picking REST, gRPC, or Kafka, you need to answer a more basic question: does this interaction block, and does the caller expect an answer? Get that wrong and no technology choice saves you.
Before you draw a single service boundary, you need a vocabulary for why some splits age well and others turn into a distributed monolith. Coupling and cohesion are that vocabulary.
Microservices are a solution to organizational scaling problems, not a technology choice. Here’s how to tell whether you actually have the problem they solve, before you pay the cost.