That's an interesting thought. Even if I would throw it away for istio in the end, the experience for managing Envoy, might be valuable.

How do I do that exactly? I need to install some iptables rules inside a pod to redirect pod traffic to envoy?

Envoy is the proxy that does the heavy lifting. Istio is just a glorified configuration system. Even if you choose to use Istio you're still using Envoy.

You're spot-on about using iptables rules. There is an example here with a yaml configuration and some iptables commands: https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/blob/main/configs/origin...

You might be able to re-use some of that. It should be pretty easy to get metrics for outbound/inbound http requests, but I don't remember the exact yaml incantation.

Thanks, I'll look into that. Might actually be the simplest solution in the end.

lol i’m not quite following how manually injecting envoy, “configuring envoy yourself/by hand” in a pod and “copying istio code for iptables re-direction” and then trying to maintain this yourself is easier than just using istio?

install istio, turn off mtls if you dont want that (https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/security/peer_...) and you have what you’re looking for. doesn’t get simpler than that.