Hmm, is the assumption that, because you're deploying an instance of the mesh as close to the application as possible, you don't need robust logic between the application and the service mesh? I can buy that I suppose.
Yes kind of -- except not in between the application and the service mesh, it's between application and application.
Imagine that for every application there is one small binary that runs and serves all it's traffic, like a chauffeur. Your application stops talking to the outside world completely and sends all messages to the small chauffeur binary -- which then talks to other chauffeurs, over the network.
Keeping with the chauffeur analogy, there is a "head office" which calls the chauffeurs on CB radio at regular intervals that lets them know which cars go where and how to start them/etc.
"head office" => "control plane"
"chauffeur" => "side-car proxy"/"data plane"
In the end what this means for your application is that you just make calls to external services (whether your own or others) and since all your communication goes through this other binary, you get monitoring, traffic shaping, enhanced security, and robustness for free.
Another interesting feature is that if the side-car proxy can actually understand your traffic, it can do even more advanced things. For example you can prevent `DELETE`s from being sent to Postgres instances at the network level.
