Advice on Istio K8sObjectOverlay.PathValue for Pod Spec Labels

I popped this on the Istio forums too but thought might have better luck here. We’re currently using Istio on our AKS Cluster with a Pod Identity binding on our ingress gateways and we’re looking to move this across to using Azure Workload Identity instead.

In the Pod Identity setup, the overlays>patches>path is used as below to add a label to the Pod spec of the gateway Deployment:

overlays:
- apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  name: istio-ingressgateway
  patches:
  - path: spec.template.metadata.labels.aadpodidbinding
    value: managed_identity_name_here
  MORE_VALUES_BELOW

This works as expected and we get a label applied to the Pods that are part of the Deployment as aadpodidbinding=managed_identity_name_here.

In order to move to Workload Identity we’re wanting to set this as azure.workload.identity/use=true and therefore edited the config as below:

overlays:
- apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  name: istio-ingressgateway
  patches:
  - path: spec.template.metadata.labels.azure.workload.identity/use
    value: true
  MORE_VALUES_BELOW

This doesn’t appear to work at all when then trying to apply the change to the Cluster using Helm. We can see the updated value in the Helm Chart but it never actually reaches the Deployment/Pod.

However, if we use the below it does update the Deployment/Pod:

- path: spec.template.metadata.labels.azure
  value: true

It seems that it doesn't like going beyond the first dot for the label prefix? So it's possible to add a label like:

- path: spec.template.metadata.labels.rubbish
  value: someValue

but not:

- path: spec.template.metadata.labels.rubbish.extended
  value: someValue

I’ve been looking at the Istio documentation (Ref 1, Ref 2) and I’m guessing I’m just not wrapping my head around something as to how to format the path for the new label that’s required. I've also seen the posts on here that are similar but it's not clicked for me looking at those (Post 1, Post 2).

If anyone has any advice it’d be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

Through some further trial and error and looking at the Istio Operator logs I've found the answer to this now as below:

- path: spec.template.metadata.labels.azure\.workload\.identity/use
  value: "true"

Any dots after the first value need escaping for the Istio Operator's RegEx to accept the value and has now successfully labelled the ingress gateway Pod via the Deployment Pod spec:

Labels:           app=istio-ingressgateway
                  azure.workload.identity/use=true

Which is definitely working as expected as the Pods now have the Azure Workload Identity variables injected (AZURE_CLIENT_ID, AZURE_TENANT_ID,AZURE_FEDERATED_TOKEN_FILE,AZURE_AUTHORITY_HOST).

Hope this helps someone else if they encounter similar!