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Envoy Proxy 101: What it is, and why it matters?

Envoy Proxy is a modern, high performance, small footprint edge and service proxy. Envoy is most comparable to software load balancers such as NGINX and HAProxy.


Originally written and deployed at Lyft, Envoy now has a vibrant contributor base and is an official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.

Background

As organizations have adopted microservices, a crucial component of deploying and managing microservices is a state-of-the-art L7 proxy. A L7 proxy provides observability, resilience, and routing in a way that’s transparent to your actual service.

Introduction to modern Network load balancing and proxying

Matt Klein - An excellent primer on load balancing in today's world, covering essential capabilities and why they're important

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Lyft's Envoy: From Monolith to Service Mesh

Matt Klein - Watch Matt Klein cover Lyft's architectural migration from monolith to a fully distributed service mesh, the origins of Envoy, a high level architectural overview, and future directions.

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API versioning and evolution with proxies

Cindy Sridharan - A L7 proxy is a powerful tool to help you iterate your APIs, while minimizing and user impact. This article discusses one such use case.

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Using API Gateways to Facilitate Your transition from Monolith to Microservices

Daniel Bryant - An API Gateway like Edge Stack is a proxy deployed at your edge, and is frequently used to faciliate a migration from monolith to microservices.

Envoy has a highly sophisticated configuration system.

Envoy has a highly sophisticated configuration system. For a basic configuration, it supports static configuration via YAML files. For more advanced configuration, Envoy has a set of gRPC-based APIs. These tutorials walk through the basics of how to configure it.

Tutorials on Using Envoy

Getting started with Envoy Proxy for microservices resilience

A basic introduction to using the Envoy Proxy and configuring it.

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Deploying Envoy with a Python Flask webapp and Kubernetes

Deploy a real application using Kubernetes, Postgres, Flask, and Envoy

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Deploying Envoy as an API Gateway for Microservices

Learn how you can deploy Envoy as an edge service in Kubernetes

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Service Mesh Integration

A service mesh is a transparent layer that adds resilience, observability, and security to your service-to-service communication. Example service meshes include Istio and Linkerd. Istio is closely associated with Envoy because Istio relies on it to do the actual Layer 7 traffic management. Istio itself is a control plane for a fleet of Envoy Proxies that are deployed next to your microservices.

Service Mesh

What is a service mesh and do I need one when developing microservices?

Daniel Bryant - this talk from MicroXchg covers what service meshes are, why they're well-suited for microservice deployments, and how to use a service mesh when you're deploying microservices

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Service mesh data plane vs. control plane

Matt Klein - As the idea of the "service mesh" has become increasingly popular over the last two years and as the number of entrants into the space has swelled

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The Mechanics of Deploying Envoy at Lyft

Matt Klein - This talk covers the logistical details of how Envoy was developed and deployed icnrementally at Lyft, focusing primarily on the evolution of service mesh configuration management.

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Additional Links

Envoy Proxy blog

Visit the official blog, learn more about Envoy and its architecture.

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Edge Stack API Gateway

Edge Stack is a Kubernetes-native API Gateway built on the Envoy Proxy.

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Envoy Proxy GitHub

The official GitHub repository. Envoy APIs are defined in the data-plane-api repository; while the code is in the repository.

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Istio

Istio is a service mesh built on the Envoy Proxy.

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