Solo DevOps at a 12-person startup does not have a platform team. You have a pager, three half-finished Terraform modules, and a founder who just asked why deploys take 40 minutes.

The trap is copying FAANG architecture because it looks like "real" engineering. You don't need a service mesh. You need:

1. One CI pipeline that deploys to one environment.

2. Alerts that page you only when a customer would notice.

3. A runbook you can read at 2am without opening five tabs.

Everything else is a future-you problem. Future-you has more people.

If this is your week: pick one of those three and finish it before you start anything new. Then write down what you did. That's the whole job.