Disable Observability and telemetry in istio 1.14

We have upgraded from istio 1.10 to 1.14 and observe that headers like x-envoy-peer-metadata, x-b3-traceid are being added by the istio ingress gateway when send http requests to the upstreams. Has there been some change in versions 1.10+ that is causing these headers to be added by default ?

Is it possible to disable observability/telemetry to ensure these headers are not added to the requests sent out to the upstream services ? We are using istio only for traffic management and not for observability so these headers are unnecessarily adding overhead.

I tried using an Envoy filter to remove these headers; something on the lines of:

patch:
      operation: INSERT_BEFORE
      value:
        name: envoy.lua
        typed_config:
          '@type': type.googleapis.com/envoy.extensions.filters.http.lua.v3.Lua
          inlineCode: |
            function envoy_on_request(request_handle)
              request_handle:headers():remove("x-envoy-peer-metadata");

And this seems to work but I would have thought that there is a way to stop these headers from being added in the first place and hence avoid all this overhead.

There's a PR opened on Istio currently that would enable controlling these headers.

So to answer your question, you can't turn this on/off globally; you can either use the Envoyfilter or remove the headers in VirtualService.