AI Inference Service Mesh Apply Istio/Linkerd mesh controls to secure and optimize east-west AI traffic across inference microservices. Why Mesh for AI - Enforce mTLS between gateway, retriever, reranker, and model services - Apply fine-grained traffic policies without app code changes - Run progressive delivery for model-serving backends - Observe latency hops for retrieval + generation chains - Route inference requests by model version, tenant, or priority tier - Protect expensive GPU-backed services from cascading failures Prerequisites Core Patterns mTLS Strict Mode Cluster-Wide Authoriza…