Kindly refer attachment.
I've deployed rate limit along with Redis in Azure AKS 1.21.9 and did some basic tests related to rate limiting, it worked as expected.

Issue Description:

I scaled down rate limit & Redis pods and tested rate limit functionality. As the rate limit and Redis pods are down, rate limit functionality should not work. But in my case, the rate limit worked even if ratelimit/Redis pods are down.

The expectation is it should not work right? If it is working, how come?

Azure AKS 1.21.9

Istio Version - 1.14

Documents used for ratelimit deployment:

https://istio.io/latest/docs/tasks/policy-enforcement/rate-limit/#verify-local-rate-limit
https://github.com/istio/istio/blob/release-1.14/samples/ratelimit/rate-limit-service.yaml
poc-ratelimitdown.docx