@scenusa the effort to re-architect the policy and telemetry subsystems, loosely called MixerV2, will completely eliminate the istio-telemetry service. In that sense, it will eliminate the CPU usage of istio-telemetry.
Instead of a distinct service, we will deliver tailored extensions to the proxies to achieve the same results. This should result in a significant reduction in CPU costs to achieve the same results (early prototyping and development efforts have shown promising results).
One of the first things we are doing along these lines is push all the environmental metadata into the proxies themselves (eliminating the need for the kubernetesenv adapter altogether). Please see my post with a design proposal for that functionality: Feedback requested: Adding k8s environmental metadata to envoy.
There will be other steps following that, including some work to allow for metadata exchange between proxies and the release of the actual extensions themselves.
You can attend next week’s P&T WG meeting if you would like to discuss the plans more directly.
cc: @mandarjog @kuat