The Platform Fix Hello Reader— Last month, I audited a platform running Istio across 180 microservices. They'd spent 18 months implementing it. Three dedicated engineers maintaining sidecar configs. Virtual services for every deployment. Complex retry policies. Circuit breakers everywhere. Traffic splitting. Distributed tracing pipelines. Annual cost: £480,000 in engineering time alone. Plus £72,000 in additional infrastructure for the mesh overhead. Then I asked the VP Engineering three...