Ingress and gateways
Routes, TLS termination and host rules declared as code, with an API gateway where you need authentication, rate limits and request shaping at the edge of the cluster.
Networking & Data
Networking, Ingress & Service Mesh
Traffic routed to the right service, encrypted in transit and shifted without dropping connections.
The work
What this actually does
Network problems in a modern stack rarely come from cables. They come from an ingress rule that sends a request to the wrong service, a certificate that is not trusted between two workloads, or a load balancer draining a node while requests are still in flight. We map how traffic actually flows today — client to edge, edge to ingress, service to service — before proposing anything new.
From there the work is configuration with intent: ingress controllers and gateways that express routes as code, health checks that match reality, timeouts and retries that do not amplify failure, and mTLS between services where it is worth the operational cost. We are equally happy to say a mesh is unnecessary at your size.
If any of these sound familiar
- An ingress rule points at the old service after a rename
- One slow dependency causes retries that cascade into an outage
- Service-to-service traffic is unencrypted inside the cluster
- Announcing a canary means editing the load balancer by hand
Scope
What's included
Every engagement on this page covers the following, sized to your setup rather than delivered as a fixed package. If something here is not relevant to you, it comes off the scope and off the price.
Traffic management
Weighted routing and traffic shifting for canary and blue/green releases, so a new version takes a controlled share of live requests before it takes all of them.
Service mesh and mTLS
Istio or Cilium configured for mutual TLS between workloads, with clear policies about which service may call which, and a plan for what happens when a sidecar misbehaves.
Resilience settings
Timeouts, retries, circuit breaking and connection draining tuned together, because a retry policy set without a timeout budget turns a small blip into a queue.
Observability of traffic
Request rates, error rates and latency per route and per service pair, so you can see which hop is slow instead of inferring it from a user complaint.
Network policy
Default-deny rules between namespaces with explicit allowances for the traffic that is genuinely needed, which shrinks the blast radius of a compromised workload.
What changes
What teams typically see
0Unencrypted service hops
5%Canary traffic share to start
1 minMedian failover time
Handover
What you keep
Everything produced during the engagement is yours: the repositories, the accounts, the documentation. There is no proprietary layer and nothing to unlicense if you take the work in-house.
- Traffic flow diagram from client to service
- Ingress and gateway configuration in version control
- Mesh or policy configuration with mTLS enabled
- Timeout, retry and drain settings documented per route
- Failover test results and rollback procedure
Tooling
Tools we use here
A starting point, not a requirement. We work in whatever you already run wherever it does the job.
Kubernetes
Istio
nginx
Cloudflare
Terraform
Prometheus
Argo CD
How it runs
From first call to handover
The same four steps on every engagement. You see each one before it starts and can stop at any of them.
- 01
Trace the traffic
We follow requests from the client through every proxy, gateway and service, documenting the path and the hops that are not doing anything useful.
- 02
Agree the target topology
A design covering ingress, routing, encryption and failure behaviour, sized to your team rather than to a conference talk about service mesh.
- 03
Configure and test failure
Configuration lands as reviewed code, then we break things deliberately: kill a pod, drain a node, blackhole a dependency and watch how the routing responds.
- 04
Hand over the runbook
Route changes, certificate rotation and traffic shifting documented as repeatable steps, with the commands your on-call engineer needs at three in the morning.
Questions
Asked before we start
Do we need a service mesh?
Usually not at first. A mesh pays off when you have many services, a requirement for mTLS everywhere, or a need for fine-grained traffic control. Below that, ingress plus network policies and good observability cover most needs with far less to operate.
Will mTLS slow our application down?
The overhead is small in practice, and connection reuse keeps it off the hot path for most traffic. The real cost is operational: certificate rotation, sidecar upgrades and debugging a mesh that silently drops traffic. We plan for those before enabling it broadly.
How do you test failover without an outage?
We rehearse in a non-production environment first, then run controlled drills in production during low traffic: draining one node, forcing a zone failure or injecting latency. Each drill has a rollback step and an observer watching the error rate.
Can you work with the load balancers we already have?
Yes. Cloud load balancers, nginx, HAProxy and hardware appliances are all workable. If a device is genuinely limiting you we will show the evidence, but most networking problems are configuration rather than hardware.
Networking & Data
Often needed alongside this
Platform & Containers
Kubernetes & Containers
Production-grade clusters with sane defaults, safe rollouts and an operator experience your team will actually enjoy.
- EKS, AKS, GKE and self-managed clusters
- Helm, Kustomize and GitOps-driven deployments
- Node autoscaling, resource tuning and cost control
Networking & Data
DNS, TLS & Certificate Automation
Certificates that renew themselves, DNS managed as code, and no more expiry-day outages.
- ACM, cert-manager and Let's Encrypt automation
- Route53, Cloudflare and Azure DNS as code
- Expiry monitoring with renewal alerting
Reliability & Performance
Monitoring & Observability
Know what broke, why it broke and who it affects — before your customers have to tell you.
- Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog & CloudWatch
- OpenTelemetry tracing and structured logging
- SLO dashboards and actionable alert routing
Worth a conversation about Networking, Ingress & Service Mesh?
Bring the specific problem. We will tell you honestly whether this is the service that fixes it, and what it would take.