<p>I want to disable istio readiness probe from doing health check.. on running service. Is there a way to disable http readiness probe and later enable it</p>

<p>Rewriting my comment as an answer as it seems to be a valid workaround for this issue:</p>

<p>You can add this annotation to the pods to disable probes on the istio-proxy containers:</p>

<p><code>status.sidecar.istio.io/port: "0"</code></p>

<p>The issue is being discussed on github, with more information: <a href="https://github.com/istio/istio/issues/9504#issuecomment-439432130" rel="noreferrer">https://github.com/istio/istio/issues/9504#issuecomment-439432130</a></p>

<p>According to some comments there, it may happen when there's no service in front of some pods, or if some ports are exposed but not declared as containerPort, or in case of some labels mismatch between pods and services.</p>
