[twblalock]

The main pain point at the moment is that meshes were written for containerized environments first, and attempts to extend full functionality to other environments are pretty immature at the moment.

Meshes are a lot more than just sidecar proxying -- they are what make sidecar proxying manageable, and they add a lot of other features like authentication, network policies, various other traffic control policies, service discovery, etc. They are an attempt to do for service-to-service communication what Kubernetes has done for container deployment -- make it abstract and declarative, with configurations that are independent from the underlying implementation.

The underlying implementation that works right now is the Kubernetes API and etcd, and alternate implementations need to be provided for those features to work well outside of Kubernetes. I think it will happen sometime in the next few years.