GitOps with Istio and ArgoCD
Managing Istio can be tough. Some years ago Istio 1.4.x was deployable via Helm, but was hard to manage desired state because of the massive microservice sprawl. Later on, Istio packaged the control plane services into a single istiod instance, and even provided support for Operator style deployments and an easy to use cli tool called istioctl. As of the time of this writing, Istio has deprecated Operator based deployments due to issues with webhook configurations that improperly register with the control plane.