Currently, our auto-injection strategy is applied to every pod in the mesh, this needs to be re-evaluated. The task involves refining our injection strategy and enhancing the configuration to provide selective control over sidecar injection.

The following steps detail the required actions:

• Identify the pods/deployments which should not have a sidecar injected.
• Enhance the configuration to control the sidecar injection based on the identification 

Refer to the Istio Documentation, Config Map template for guidance on how to implement exceptions for sidecar injection. Newer docs do not have this section anymore but based on the linked cfg map template it is still available.

Please note that pod annotation (sidecar.istio.io/inject: "true/false") holds higher precedence. Therefore, even if the configmap settings suggest otherwise, the sidecar injection will follow the annotation directives on the pods.

Examples of auto-injection causing problems (namely conflicting with other initContainers):

• https://github.com/maistra/odh-manifests/pull/17#discussion_r1234317827
• knative webhook communication