Istio Proxy Slow to startup (TCP Connection Failures)

Hi All,

Hoping this is something I’ve misconfigured on my end. Context:
Istio 1.5.4 installed in a GKE cluster.

I have a NodeJS App that connects to Cassandra cluster (inside the mesh) on startup. The Cassandra cluster has a prometheus-to-sd exporter as a side car as well.

When the prometheus-to-sd container starts up, it is not able to open an outbound TCP socket, and when the NodeJS app starts up, it’s not able to connect to cassandra (ERCONNREFUSED). After some time, both containers will start up. If I remove the istio side car from both workloads, they startup successfully every time, which leads me to believe the side car is blocking the outbound tcp connection.

Anything I could look into to debug this further?