We’re using a Service Mesh with Istio for things like mTLS between the services. What happens when I address a POD directly by its IP address. Would this work to bypass things we set up with Istio? From my understanding, using the IP address from the Pod where the application is running, will ultimately bypass the service mesh?
No it will not bypass Istio.
The pod is configured with an IP address, that IP address will direct traffic to the Istio Sidecar container in the pod which will in turn call the service container on the pod’s
localhost.
Good explanation here.