Service Mesh or Ingress Decision Memo

Decide how traffic enters and moves in a cluster.

Added October 15, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked for clarity and placeholders; not reviewed by a lawyer, accountant, clinician or other professional. How these prompts are made

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Write a decision memo about ingress and service-to-service traffic. Number of services and teams: [SERVICES_TEAMS]. Requirements (mutual encryption, traffic splitting, retries, observability): [REQUIREMENTS]. Team experience: [EXPERIENCE]. Platform: [PLATFORM].

Structure the memo: context, options (ingress controller only, gateway API, service mesh, library-based approach), evaluation criteria with weights, a scoring table, operational burden estimate in person-days per month, security benefits, failure modes, and recommendation with an exit strategy. Include a minimal pilot plan with success criteria. Flag assumptions about features that vary by product and ask me to verify them against current documentation. Keep the memo to two pages.

Add a section describing what would make you reverse the decision, with concrete triggers such as operational cost exceeding a number of person-days or latency overhead beyond a threshold. Include a stakeholder table of who is affected (platform team, application teams, security) and what each needs from the decision, and a communication plan for announcing it.

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Context: 14 services, 4 teams, need mutual encryption and canary releases.
Options: ingress only; gateway API; mesh; library-based.
Criteria (weights): security 25, traffic control 20, operational burden 25, team skill 15, cost 15.
Scores (1-5): ingress only 2.8; gateway 3.4; mesh 3.6; library 3.0.
Operational burden for the mesh: about 8 person-days per month (estimate).
Recommendation: gateway now; revisit a mesh when more than 25 services need mutual encryption.
Pilot: 3 services, success criteria: less than 5 ms added latency, canary in place.
Exit: remove sidecars in 2 weeks. Verify product features against current documentation.

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