Platform Engineering is the new black and we posit that service mesh is the perfect complement and an indispensable sharp tool in every SRE’ tool belt. Albeit been around for a few years, service meshes are now blossoming into a de-facto standard for providing much needed features to cloud-native platforms, such as zero-trust security enforcement, observability, traffic shaping and control over the application networking layer(s). This demo-heavy presentation will walk you thru the rationale behind adopting a service mesh and what it can do in practice to alleviate the pain of running at-scale platforms to deliver cloud-native self-service infrastructure to developers. We will focus on Istio (the most popular service mesh) but the learning extends to any other service mesh implementation; we will provide a workshop-style repository to follow offline.