Istio finally brings internal HTTPS routing with SNI-based traffic rules. Services in the mesh can now talk over port 443—TLS fully intact. Just like in prod.
TLS terminates at the ingress gateway. Routing pivots on SNI, not headers. Which makes this much closer to real-world mTLS flows.
What’s the play? Use internal HTTPS in your E2E tests. It closes the gap between test and prod, locking in tighter infra parity.
