When setting up istio separately on a GKE autopilot cluster and not making use of gke managed service, so you can installed it but won't be able to get istio side car to run when you deploy your application. Then you will get some error such as if you look the log explorer :- " 'istio-init' not allowed; Autopilot only allows the capabilities: 'AUDIT_WRITE,CHOWN,DAC_OVERRIDE,FOWNER,FSETID,KILL,MKNOD,NET_BIND_SERVICE,NET_RAW,SETFCAP,SETGID,SETPCAP,SETUID,SYS_CHROOT,SYS_PTRACE'."]} " This is by design. But you can override it by running the following command and that would get your pod to be running in an istio injected namespace. gcloud container clusters update $CLUSTER_NAME --workload-policies=allow-net-admin As you can see here, after running the gcloud command above, we are able to see the pod and sidecar running.