You have written a Flask, Express, or Spring service. You have called another service over HTTP. You have used curl -v and watched the TLS handshake happen. That is your starting point. By the end of this curriculum you will be able to design a service-mesh deployment — pick sidecar vs edge proxy, route on path or header, set timeout / retry budget / circuit breaker / outlier detection thresholds for a concrete workload, choose mTLS posture, decide local vs global rate limit, and predict what happens when the control plane dies — and defend each choice with a named scene.

This curriculum is the working developer's guide to the piece of infrastructure every microservice request passes through, in the order the production problems show up. It is also a curriculum about a specific, density-of-vocabulary realization: across 13 scenes there are roughly 28 named technical terms, and each scene introduces at most two. The visual carries the load; the vocabulary follows.

Resist the urge to "describe Envoy" or "describe Istio." Make decisions yourself, defend them, and let the design push back. Every knob you can name on the design canvas is a knob you can defend in a production review.