> There seemed to be an implicit claim that client-side load balancing is a win, but I couldn’t quite parse the argument.<p>Having 1 hop for load balancing (usually on a server that most likely isn't on the same rack as your application) is worse than 0 hop for load balancing in your localhost. No Single point of failure and much lower chances of domino effect if a configuration goes awry.<p>> When would you choose this approach to wiring services together, as opposed to consciously building more or less everything as a service with an endpoint, in the AWS style?<p>I do not understand this. What's "wiring services together" vs "service with an endpoint"? They both are one and the same thing in context of gateway vs service mesh. Maybe you should read this - <a href="https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/api-gateways-are-going-through-an-identity-crisis/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.christianposta.com/microservices/api-gateways-a...</a><p>> but as with most K8s demos, assumes that you’ve everything up and running and configured<p>Because that is what the whole "Cloud" thing is about. You don't pull out an RJ45 everytime you need to connect your server to your router, you just assume your cloud provider did it for you. You don't compile your own Kernel & OS to run your services, you just use a Linux Distro and get over it. Kubernetes is supposed to be a cloud offering, you are not supposed to configure and run it.<p>> One thing made me gasp then laugh. Kelsey said “for the next step, you just have to put this in your Go imports, you don’t have to use it or anything... I was all “WTF how can that do anything?” but then a few minutes later he started wiring endpoint URIs into config files that began with xdi: and oh, of course. Still, is there, a bit of a code smell happening or is that just me?<p>Because you weren't paying attention to the Speaker. He clearly mentions the drawbacks to sidecar as proxy model - additional latency (although the latency is much lower than that of a single Gateway architecture, but even 1ms could be disastrous for some applications). To cater to this high performance crowd they have envoy as an application library model, which is of course more difficult to adapt, but worth it when the added latency drops to nano seconds.