I like this. I am a firm believer of keeping things simple until you need them. Service meshes have their place, and they are useful when your running at scale, or you really need all the features, but most people don't need them. You often hear people asking for enhanced telemetry, or that they need it to load balance grpc. The simple solution is to fix the telemetry in your app, and get your grpc client to use a headless k8s service and set it up correctly. This is a bit more involved upfront, but its better than maintaining another tool, and adding the extra complexity to your infra.