Istio as a traditional ingress controller

Hello all,

I am curious about trying out istio. We have a couple of microservices deployed in various namespaces in our cluster which would benefit from the authentication layer offered by istio and therein lies my main interest.

We also have a bunch of traditional web applications running - some front-ends, some wordpress stuff - nothing special.

I was wondering if it’s sensible to use istio as the sole ingress provider also to the traditional web applications, or if there is some crazy performance hit over, for instance, nginx-ingress.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks!