Cloud-native describes a way of building applications on a cloud platform to iteratively discover and deliver business value. We now have access to a lot of similar technology that the large internet companies pioneered and used to their advantage to dominate their respective markets. What challenges arise when we start building applications to take advantage of this new technology? In this talk we'll explore the role of service meshes when building distributed systems, why they make sense, and where they don't make sense. We will look at a class of problem that crops up that service mesh cannot solve, but that frameworks and even new programming languages like Ballerina are aiming to solve