Hi pike liang,
Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A Platform! Thank you for asking your question here.
1.Can Azure Istio addon Service Mesh work together with NGINX ingress controller?
Yes, the Azure Istio Service Mesh add-on can operate alongside the NGINX ingress controller on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). They manage traffic in distinct ways: Istio enhances service-to-service communication, security, and observability, whereas the NGINX ingress controller is tasked with routing HTTP/S traffic into your cluster.
2.Can Azure Istio addon ingress gateway support multiple intranet gateway with different subnets?
The Azure Istio add-on for AKS does have specific limitations regarding the configuration of ingress gateways. While Istio itself can be configured to use multiple ingress gateways for different traffic patterns or subnets in a standard deployment, the Azure-managed Istio add-on currently does not support deploying multiple internal ingress gateways in different subnets.
If you need to set up multiple ingress controllers in different subnets, you might need to manage Istio manually instead of using the Azure Istio add-on, as the add-on is optimized for simpler scenarios and does not yet support complex multi-gateway configurations.
For more information, please look into:
https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/tutorials/nginx-ingress-istio/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/istio-deploy-ingress?source=recommendations
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/app-routing
https://istio.io/latest/docs/tasks/traffic-management/ingress/ingress-control/
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