eBPF and service mesh both optimize the functionality around networking, observability, and security. Are they competing? Or complementary to each other? To what extent can eBPF play a role in a service mesh? How does the role of the service proxy change? In this talk, we will dig into the role of eBPF for a service mesh data plane and what are some of the tradeoffs in terms of features, resource overhead, feature isolation, security granularity and upgrade impact for various data-plane architectures: shared proxy vs shared proxy per node vs sidecar proxy vs shared proxy per service account etc.