As far as a service mesh, check out Linkerd! I find Istio much harder to setup and manage. Linkerd is super simple and has always worked pretty much out of the box for me.
This may be fully acceptable for you, but should not be glossed over.
From my experience, linkerd had the most seamless deployment to get to the most feature-complete out-of-the box experience with monitoring etc. But as it goes with these things there’s a much bigger amortized cost in terms of magic to unwind if you need to integrate it.
