The magnanimous shift to cloud-native has brought with it obvious changes and shifts in how DevOps’ manage application deployments. Key among the challenges are observability and monitoring, logging, routing and, of course, security. As a way to keep this all under control, service meshes are increasingly seen not only as extremely useful extra layers to have — but as a necessity production pipelines, deployments and operations running on microservices and Kubernetes live and die by.

This was the main theme of a The New Stack makers podcast hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack and co-hosted by Sriram Subramanian, founder and principal at CloudDon. From Instana, which offers application performance management (APM) solutions for microservices; Williams and Subramanian were joined by Mirko Novakovic, Instana CEO and co-founder, and Michele Mancioppi, Instana senior technical product manager.