Currently Istio does not support a fully automated certificate procedure. The standard ingress does support this by means of cert-manager. Would it be possible to combine standard ingress configuration for certification management with istio for other stuff? What are the down-sides to this combination?
This was discussed in a blog post on Medium last fall, actually. I held onto the link because I too am interested in using nginx-ingress as the front-end, but then taking advantage of istio "for other stuff". If it pans out for you, would love to hear.