Why Tuft Mesh Vault exists
Mesh infrastructure you provision and own
Martin Cottrell built the first version of Tuft Mesh Vault in the second half of 2019, working evenings after a day job that involved debugging a commercial service mesh whose control plane was, in his words, 'a YAML graveyard with a dashboard bolted on.' The specific problem was a certificate rotation bug that took four days to diagnose because the vendor's internal state was not observable. He wrote a 200-line routing kernel over a long weekend to prove the concept was tractable, and kept going.
Martin Cottrell spent eight years building distributed systems at a mid-size payments processor before leaving to write Tuft Mesh Vault's first routing kernel in 2019. Before that he shipped a service-mesh observability layer for a logistics SaaS that handled roughly 40,000 daily API calls across three data centres. He started Tuft Mesh Vault because he kept running into the same wall: vendors who abstracted away the control plane and called it a feature. He runs the project from a home office, reviews every pull request personally, and reads network-engineering RFCs on Saturday mornings. He is not a morning person, but the RFCs help.