See GH Issue: looking for migration guide from nginx ingress to istio
When deploying nginx-ingress you can add the following pod annotation to tell istio to NOT intercept incoming traffic to nginx-ingress.
traffic.sidecar.istio.io/includeInboundPorts: ""
Then for outbound traffic you can setup 2 annotations on your Ingress to avoid using endpoints directly and use istio instead.
kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/service-upstream: "true"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/upstream-vhost: <svc name>.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local