[QUESTION] Istio canary without sidecars

[nikatar]

Hi! Thanks for Flagger - awesome project.

Docs show enabling Istio sidecar injection in the canary tutorial: https://docs.flagger.app/tutorials/istio-progressive-delivery#bootstrap

Question: Is canary with meshProvider: istio supported when workloads are not sidecar-injected and only the Istio IngressGateway & VirtualService?

If yes:

• any caveats or required settings?
• is validating canaries using Prometheus metrics from the ingressgateway via MetricTemplate an officially supported approach?

Environment:

• Flagger: v1.41.0
• Istio: 1.24.2
• Kubernetes: v1.32.6-eks-931bdca

Thanks!