While the cry of “breaking apart the monolith” can be heard throughout the industry, the Istio service mesh took a different tack, and consolidated its control plane microservices into one binary. How did we get here? In this talk, Google DA and Istio Steering Committee member Craig Box will talk about how the team building the service mesh designed it based on the internal Google services it was emulating, why that turned out to be the wrong choice, and how the ship was righted. Google engineer and Istio Environments working group lead Sam Naser will talk about how the new model allows for safer upgrades of the mesh, letting users test new versions with a canary model before rolling out to the whole fleet.