Hey,
I'm not sure if there's a huge amount you can do about this one...

If you read through kubernetes/ingress-nginx#1968 - you will see that the nginx-ingress-controller attempts to query the kubernetes api (kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local) for the version almost immediately when it boots, and it retries for around 30 seconds before its' actually able to successfully get a response.

The nginx-ingress-controller connects first time when it is started without istio-proxy.

We worked around this by adding a retry/delay into the controller to give istio-proxy time to "boot", but it feels like something we shouldn't really need to be doing?

Could this be because istio-proxy is taking a while to sync the config that says mtlsExcludedServices: kubernetes.default.svc.cluster.local?

Thoughts?