Hello Reader—

I'm writing this from my hotel in Hamburg. In 3 hours, I'll be on stage at Bit Summit talking about platform simplification.

Deutsche Bank and ING will be in the front row. But here's what I won't mention in my talk:

"Steve, we need Istio. Everyone's using service mesh."

Those words cost a UK retail bank £2M and 18 months. Last Tuesday, we ripped it all out.

Service Mesh Is Like Insurance:

It sounds responsible until you read the fine print.

What vendors promise (and what I'll diplomatically acknowledge on stage):

• "Automatic security!"
• "Observable everything!"
• "Traffic management magic!"

What you actually get (what I'm telling YOU):

• 10x YAML complexity
• Sidecars that never die
• Latency you can't explain
• Engineers who can't debug production

Real data from that £2M disaster:

• Setup time: 6 months (promised 6 weeks)
• Additional engineers needed: 4
• Performance overhead: 23%
• Problems it actually solved: 1

The killer? Their original problem could've been solved with basic network policies. 20 lines of YAML. One afternoon.

But here's what I WILL share on stage today: Our GitOps-based simplification approach that's helping major European banks cut platform complexity by 70%.

Platform Psychology Insight:

Engineers adopt service mesh for the same reason they buy gym memberships in January - it feels like the responsible thing to do. But complexity compounds. Every abstraction you add is a mortgage on your team's future. Choose your debt wisely.

[I might actually use this gym membership line on stage. We'll see how brave I feel.]

Reader Success:

Sarah at well-known UK telco was 4 months into Istio implementation. Ran our Reality Check. Realized they needed basic TLS, not service mesh. Switched to nginx ingress + cert-manager. Done in 2 weeks. Saved £430k/year in infrastructure and salaries.

Quick Win:

Before adopting ANY new CNCF tool, ask: "What specific problem does this solve that we have TODAY?" Not tomorrow. Not "might have." TODAY. If the answer takes more than one sentence, you don't need it.

What's Coming Next Week:

The Kubernetes feature that's secretly burning £50k/month (hint: it's not what you think). Plus: How to cut platform costs by 50% without touching a single workload.

Keep simplifying

-Steve

P.S. If you're at Bit Summit today, find me after my talk. Happy to share the stories that didn't make it into the "official" presentation. First round's on me.

P.P.S. Help train the spam filters - if this landed anywhere but primary, give it a quick drag. Platform Fix is too pragmatic for the promotions tab.

P.P.P.S. Service mesh has its place. In about 20% of architectures. For the other 80%? You're buying a Ferrari to sit in traffic. (Yes, I'm putting this in my slides.)

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