Are Service Meshes making Microservices Development Complex?

I have been looking at Service Meshes and trying to understand how we could recommend it to customers looking to move to a Microservices based architecture. On the face of it, it looks like there is a bit of infrastructure work that the Microservice developers may have to do, as the Service Mesh works at a lower level, at the network level.

This means that developers would now need to understand network operations in some detail, especially since circuit breakers and the like are now coming into the development realm. This leads to the question: is using a Service Mesh a must when defining a Microservices architecture requiring integration? Or is it only needed if we are building Cloud native architectures? For hybrid and on premise integration, is using an API gateway and a messaging layer an alternative to a Service Mesh? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Originally posted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/service-meshes-making-microservices-development-complex-danesh-zaki/