How to overwrite namespace default stable tag istio injection with canary tag in deployment

Question

I have Istio 1.12.0 running with a stable tag and I have upgraded my istio version to 1.13.9 with canary tag. The default tag is mapped with 1.12.0 and added to the namespace.

Now I want to overwrite the namespace injection with the canary tag in the deployment for one application.

Note- I have tried to add pod label istio.io/rev: canary in deployment but couldn't get success, still picked the stable tag 1.12.0 which comes from namespace injection.

Is there any way to overwrite the injection based on labels or annotation?

istioctl tag list output 

TAG     REVISION NAMESPACES
canary  1-13-9   bookinfo
default 1-12-0   dev
stable  1-12-0

Answer 1

There is a process described in istio documentation to manually relabel your istio versions when you are performing the upgradation of the control plane. The document clearly outlines how to upgrade your istio control plane using canary deployment model, refer this for more information.