CASE 38 · MAVEN · 2026
Service-to-service mTLS without a service mesh.
A healthcare platform had been told they needed Istio to do mutual TLS between services. The team had tried Istio twice and walked away both times. We delivered the same security property with VPC Lattice and IAM auth in three weeks.
Healthcare platform
SECURITY
2026
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
mTLS COVERAGE
100%
OPERATIONAL OVERHEAD
NONE
AUDIT EVIDENCE
CLOUDTRAIL
TIME TO DELIVER
3w
HOW IT WENT
The CISO had a non-negotiable: service-to-service traffic in production had to be authenticated and encrypted at the application layer, not just the network layer. The platform team agreed. They just didn’t want to operate a service mesh to get there.
VPC Lattice landed in a sweet spot — managed control plane, IAM-based auth (which the team already had for everything else), and X-Ray integration for the observability gap a mesh would have filled. Application code didn’t change; the SDK injected the SigV4 signing automatically.
Three weeks from kickoff to all 31 internal services running through Lattice with IAM auth. Audit evidence is CloudTrail. The team that had walked away from Istio twice approved this one in the first design review.
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